When Miley Cyrus won her first Grammys in 2024 (Record of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance for “Flowers” from 2023’s Endless Summer Vacation), something shifted. “I think somewhere inside of me, I needed to hold a trophy and just feel for a moment that I have something that I can hold in my hands that feels like a true achievement,” the 32-year-old child star turned pop icon tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “After every album, I’ve been able to say, ‘Well, I made the album I set out to make, and that’s enough.’ Somewhere, I was avoiding the fact that it did matter to me.” Having finally achieved the validation she’d been longing to feel since childhood, Cyrus says she “felt free to make the album that I’ve really been craving my whole adult career to create.” The name of the resulting album, her ninth, emerged out of the ether while riffing in the studio with producer Max Taylor-Sheppard and Cyrus’ boyfriend/collaborator, Liily drummer Maxx Morando. “As soon as [Taylor-Sheppard] played the first chord, I just said, ‘Tell me something beautiful tonight.’ It was so easy, but I have no idea where it came from. The chord he played was so beautiful that what needed to be said had to be beautiful.” In the title track, a Sunday morning soul jam erupts with a “flash, bang, spark” into post-apocalyptic prog-rock distortion. That clash of sensuality and chaos extends through Something Beautiful, whose ’80s-inspired melodrama swings for the fences in sound and theme. The deceptively sparkly-sounding “End of the World” celebrates one last blowout bash before the sky falls. “This, to me, is pop music in its fullest form,” Cyrus says. “Pop gets given a bad name by manufactured label creations, and that’s just not what it is.” She’s thinking of legendary pop innovators who evolved with the times: David Bowie, Madonna, Elton John. The ultra-funky “Easy Lover” was intended for another such icon: Cyrus originally wrote it circa 2020’s Plastic Hearts, then refurbished it for placement on Beyoncé’s COWBOY CARTER. When Bey went with “II MOST WANTED” instead, Cyrus kept the slinky number for herself, recruiting Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard to play electric guitar—though the “Tell ’em, B!” ad-lib stays. Cyrus’ inimitable voice has never sounded more soulful, though that has not come without a price. She tells Apple Music she has Reinke’s edema, a rare condition which causes fluid to build up in the outer layer of the vocal folds—hence her trademark rasp. “So I have this very large polyp on my vocal cord, which has given me a lot of the tone and the texture that has made me who I am,” she says. “But it’s extremely difficult to perform with, because it’s like running a marathon with ankle weights on.” It could be removed surgically, but for Cyrus, the benefit isn’t worth the risk, “because the chance of waking up from surgery and not sounding like myself is a probability.” Throughout a career that’s spanned two-thirds of her life, Cyrus has felt lost in the static. “White noise is essentially everything happening all at the same time, and I feel like that was what the last 20 years of my career felt like,” she says. But while recording Something Beautiful, she found herself coming to terms with everything that’s come before. Over the heavy disco groove of “Reborn,” she delivers a mission statement: “If heaven exists/I’ve been there before/Kill my ego/Let’s be reborn.”