Miley Cyrus Begins a New Era with ‘Bass Persuades’: How She Became a Major Pop Icon

Miley Cyrus needs no introduction anymore. After almost 20 years of career, three Grammys and a collection of songs that form part of the pop imagination of several generations, her name speaks for itself. So much that for her new era she has decided to drop the surname: she is now simply MILEY. Behind that change comes Bass Persuades, her tenth studio album, with which she once again proves that, if something has defined her career, it is precisely her reluctance to stay in the same place for too long.

To understand the Miley of today you have to go back to Hannah Montana. In 2006, at only 13 years old, Miley Cyrus became the lead of one of Disney’s most popular series and the face of an entire generation. Hannah Montana was not only a television phenomenon: it also turned Miley into a musical star. While the series thrived, she filled arenas, released albums and built a career that would soon start to compete with the fiction itself.

The problem was that for a large part of the audience Miley and Hannah Montana were exactly the same person. The image of a good girl, friendly and family-oriented that Disney had built around her started to feel small as she grew up. Her career has, for much of it, been the process of leaving behind that label and finding her own place as an artist.

In 2008, still with Hannah Montana on air, she posed for Vanity Fair in a photoshoot that provoked a huge controversy for an image in which she appeared covered only with a sheet. She was 15 and ended up apologizing for photographs that, as she explained then, were not intended to represent anything other than what they were. A year later came her performance at the Teen Choice Awards, where she appeared dancing around a stripper pole, and soon after she would begin to adopt an aesthetic increasingly distant from the Disney girl.

The transformation became even more evident with Can’t Be Tamed, published in 2010. The album and, especially, its title track and its video showed a Miley who openly spoke of freedom, sexuality and independence. She no longer wanted to be the perfect teenager the public had known, though there were still a few years left before the definitive break would arrive.

A Controversial Career

In 2013, Miley decided to take that process to the end. She shaved her head, radically changed her image and released Bangerz, an album that bore little resemblance to the teenage star of a few years before. The video for We Can’t Stop, her performance at the MTV Video Music Awards alongside Robin Thicke and, above all, Wrecking Ball ended up turning her transformation into one of the major events in pop culture of that era.

The VMA performance was especially controversial: Miley appeared on stage with a very different look, she twerked and starred in a provocative performance with Thicke. For weeks, it seemed impossible to open a media outlet without encountering a new conversation about her. For some she had crossed a line; but in reality she was doing what so many male stars had done before without receiving the same amount of criticism.

And perhaps that is the most important part of that era. Miley was not trying to prove that she could be a bad girl. She was trying to prove that she was no longer a Disney character. She had grown up in front of millions and, for the first time, was taking control of how she wanted to present herself to the world, even if to achieve it she had to take the break to the extreme.

From Provocation to Constant Reinvention

What is interesting about Miley is that Bangerz did not end up becoming her new identity. Once she managed to shed Hannah Montana, she did not want to be confined to the provocative star character the public had built around her. And her career changed direction again.

In 2015 came Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, an experimental and psychedelic project that she released for free, and that moved away from conventional pop. Two years later, with Younger Now, she took another turn and moved closer to country and her musical roots. And in 2020 she surprised again with Plastic Hearts, a rock album in which she collaborated with artists such as Joan Jett, Stevie Nicks and Billy Idol. Each phase seemed to contradict the previous one, but that was precisely the key: Miley did not want to find a single version of herself, but to have the freedom to try them all.

Until Flowers. Released in 2023 as the first single from Endless Summer Vacation, the song became one of the biggest successes of her career and a global phenomenon. Miley regained the spotlight from a very different place: she no longer needed to sensationalize to attract attention. A song, a perfectly recognizable voice, and lyrics that the public quickly turned into an anthem of independence were enough. The success was recognized at the 2024 Grammys, where she won her first awards in the categories of Recording of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance.

A New Era

After Something Beautiful, her last album released in 2025 — and about which she decided not to tour — Miley opens another new era. And this time the change even starts with the name: to present her tenth studio album she has decided to drop the Cyrus surname and keep only MILEY.

There doesn’t seem to be a major rupture behind it nor a particularly dramatic explanation. Rather, the decision works as an independence declaration after almost two decades of career. Miley no longer needs her surname to identify her: her name is enough. As with other great figures in music, she has reached the point where saying one word is enough to know exactly who we are talking about.

Bass Persuades will arrive on September 18 and again explores that blend of pop and rock that has accompanied several of her recent eras, though with a darker and more electronic production. The album will also feature contributions from Model/Actriz and Andrew Wyatt and, as the singer has teased, revolves around a very simple idea: the physical and emotional power of music, that ability to make us dance, feel or react even before we understand exactly what it is provoking in us.

And if there is a way to visually understand this new era, it is through the music video for the first single, the song that gives the album its name: Bass Persuades. Miley has once again stepped in front of the camera to reclaim a look that inevitably recalls her Cant Be Tamed years, but this time she does so from a different place: she no longer seems to want to escape from that Miley, but rather to pay homage to her.

The video, directed by Mert Alas, is packed with references to some of the great stars who defined 2000s pop. The most obvious is Britney Spears and Madonna in Me Against the Music, the collaboration that they starred in in 2003 and that became one of the great moments of that decade. The aesthetics, attitude and some of the choreography of Bass Persuades directly recall that video, although Miley also plays with references to other icons such as Lady Gaga or Michael Jackson.

Miley Cyrus is an icon because she has managed something especially difficult for a star who started her career as a child: growing up without getting trapped in any of her previous versions. For almost two decades she has changed image, sound and direction, but she has always managed to maintain something that makes her recognizable: a distinctive voice and an unusual ability to reinvent herself without losing the audience’s interest.

Now remains to discover what she has prepared for this new era. Bass Persuades will arrive on September 18 and, after all Miley has demonstrated throughout her career, the desire to listen to it is more than evident. If there is anything this has made clear so far, it’s that it’s never too easy to anticipate what her next move will be, and precisely for that reason this new album presents itself as one of those novelties that you want to listen to from start to finish and discover without knowing exactly what we’re going to find.