Miley Cyrus and the decade-long argument with her own origin story

When ‘Flowers’ broke streaming records in 2023 and delivered Miley Cyrus her first Grammy at 31, critics reached for the word ‘comeback.’ It wasn’t. The career she built after leaving the wig and the double life behind was always there — it just took the audience longer to accept it than it took her.

The central problem in Miley Cyrus’s career has never been talent. It has been identity — specifically, whose version of her identity gets to count. She arrived in the popular imagination as a corporate construct: a girl with a secret, a wig, a name that wasn’t hers, performing songs she hadn’t written. That she turned that starting position into a 20-year argument with the music industry, ending with a Grammy for Record of the Year and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is either the best possible outcome of a Disney childhood or evidence that the premise was wrong from the start.

The daughter of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus and his wife Tish, she grew up outside Nashville as Destiny Hope Cyrus — born November 23, 1992, in Franklin, Tennessee — in a household where music was ambient rather than aspirational. The childhood nickname ‘Smiley,’ contracted to Miley, would eventually become legal. By nine she had a small role in a Tim Burton film. By eleven she was auditioning for a Disney Channel series opposite a producer who thought she was too young and too small for the lead. She got the part.

Hannah Montana, which debuted in 2006, was built on a premise so structurally neat it almost collapsed under its own logic: a teenage girl who is also, in secret, a pop star — the ordinary life and the extraordinary one coexisting through a blonde wig. Cyrus played both, lived both, and reportedly worked twelve-hour days at thirteen to sustain both. The show ran until 2011. The franchise sold tens of millions of records. It made her a name. It also made her a property.

The decade that followed was less a career than a negotiation — each album a rejection of the last persona and a proposition about who the next one might be. Breakout (2008) and ‘Party in the U.S.A.’ (2009) softened the transition while the Disney contract cooled. Bangerz (2013) was the loudest departure: hip-hop production, a Wrecking Ball video that was simultaneously self-parody and genuine pathos, a triple-platinum run, and a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Vocal Album. Critics couldn’t agree on what they were seeing. That was the point.

After the experimental free release of Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz (2015) and the brief country-leaning Younger Now (2017), she arrived at Plastic Hearts (2020) — a glam-rock album recorded partly in response to a wildfire that destroyed her Malibu home and a marriage that ended. Joan Jett and Billy Idol appeared as collaborators, not as endorsers. The record drew the most serious critical attention of her career to that point: here, finally, was evidence that the reinventions weren’t arbitrary.

The argument against Miley Cyrus has always been coherence. Critics who followed the pivots from bubblegum to hip-hop to country to rock read them as marketing, not artistic biography — the moves of someone unwilling or unable to commit. There is a counter-case. The thread that connects Bangerz to Plastic Hearts to Something Beautiful is not genre but control: in each era, she pushed further from the image others built around her and closer to music she had a hand in making. The 2013 VMA performance, which drew more moralistic coverage than any musical moment that decade, was retrospectively framed as pure provocation. In her own accounting it was more specific: an attempt to be seen as an adult artist by people determined to see a child actress misbehaving.

‘Flowers,’ the first single from Endless Summer Vacation (2023), broke Spotify’s record for streams in a single week. It was a maximalist pop song about self-sufficiency, written after her divorce from actor Liam Hemsworth. At the 66th Grammy Awards in February 2024, it won Record of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance — her first two Grammys at 31. The delay says as much about who the Recording Academy rewards as it does about the quality of her output across two decades.

Something Beautiful (2025), her ninth studio album, was released alongside a companion film she co-directed — a concept record described by Cyrus as ‘an attempt to medicate a sick culture through music.’ Darker and more formally ambitious than Endless Summer Vacation, it earned a deluxe edition featuring Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, and David Byrne. Reviews were divided on whether the concept outpaced the songs; they agreed it was the most unconditionally her own thing she had made.

In May 2026, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — the 2,845th — with her mother and her fiancé, rock drummer Maxx Morando, present at the ceremony. Three weeks later, the Attention Tour opened at Dodger Stadium: a stadium run built around Something Beautiful, carrying the album to the kind of audience that once watched Hannah Montana play arenas while two versions of the same girl tried, in good faith, to pretend they weren’t the same person.

Tags: pop, singers, flowers, Joan Jett, Miley Cyrus, Plastic Hearts

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