The New Yorker:

“Something Beautiful” may be the pop star’s first record to fully take advantage of the unusual array of sonic colors she is able to draw upon.

By Rachel Syme

Two weeks ago, in the run-up to the release of her ninth studio album, “Something Beautiful,” Miley Cyrus, who is thirty-two and one of the most successful pop stars of all time, revealed, in an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, that she has a little-known medical condition called Reinke’s edema. Also known as polypoid corditis, it is a noncancerous throat disorder that, when the voice is overused, can cause fluid to accumulate in the vocal folds, making them swell up and feel gummy and thick. Cyrus explained that she has lived with the issue for much of her life, and she was careful to note that while most people tend to develop symptoms at an older age, usually as a result of smoking, her particular case was innate. “My voice always sounded like this. So, it’s a part of my unique anatomy.” She also insisted, calmly, that she has absolutely no intention of fixing the problem. She had one minor operation, in 2019, but when the doctors suggested further surgery to remove a giant polyp from her vocal cords she vehemently refused. “I’m not willing to sever it,” she told Lowe, given “the chance of waking up from a surgery and not sounding like myself.”

It makes sense that Cyrus would be reluctant to risk her instrument, which is currently one of the all-time great voices in pop music. Her timbre, having deepened as she has aged, is rich and rumbly (in a typical high-school chorus, Cyrus would likely be seated in the “Alto 2” section), but it is also oddly nasal, with a shimmery breathiness and a hint of blatty Tennessee twang that evokes her status as Nashville royalty, the daughter of the country star Billy Ray Cyrus and the goddaughter of Dolly Parton. She is able to launch into long notes with a delicate, lamblike vibrato and come out of them with a leonine growl, as if she has swallowed sandpaper mid-tune. Of all of Cyrus’s vocal gifts, perhaps the most pronounced is her rare ability to add a rasp to any line without ever sacrificing volume. She can send her voice to places that sound truly dangerous, where it seems like she is right on the edge of shredding her cords to ribbons—and yet, miraculously, the center holds. Who would want to give that up? On the contrary, “Something Beautiful” may be Cyrus’s first album to fully take advantage of the unusual array of sonic colors she is able to draw upon.

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