Miley Cyrus Talks Pop Star Peers, ‘Winding Down’ Her Focus on Mainstream Success After ‘Something Beautiful’

Next year things might look a bit different for Miley Cyrus, who says in a conversation with The New York Times that she’s looking forward to a “rebirth of how I look at my career.”

When asked about her relationship with mainstream success, Cyrus, who just released her ninth studio album, Something Beautiful, spoke of what she sees next for herself as an artist.

“I think it’s winding down, my attachment to mainstream success,” Cyrus said in the video interview, published on Saturday, May 31. (A shortened version of the full interview was published on the outlet’s website.)

“I kind of feel like this album, it’s definitely not a ‘last lap’ — I’m definitely not going 180 in my career necessarily right now — but I think it’s potentially the last time I’ll do it exactly this way,” she noted.

The singer announced Something Beautiful in March, when she gave fans a first listen to album track “Prelude” and the set’s title track. She’s since released two more singles, “End of the World” and “More to Lose,” and just before the album’s release held a private concert hosted by TikTok at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles. Still to come is a visual component to the project, a film set to show in theaters for one night only on June 12 in the United States and Canada, and internationally on June 27. 

Cyrus — whose previous full-length release, 2023’s Endless Summer Vacation, reached No. 3 on the Billboard 200 — said, “I’m taking a big bet on this one [Something Beautiful]. I’m all in. But I don’t think I’ll put myself in a position that I add this much pressure to myself again.”

“A lot of things are going to change about that for me, towards the end [of this year] and the beginning of next year. That’s really kind of my focus, of using this year to kind of wind that idea I’ve had of myself down. There’s a song on the album called ‘Reborn’ and it’s kind of about this. I feel like next year for me is gonna be kind of this rebirth of how I do things and how I look at my career,” said Cyrus.

The conversation clocked in at nearly an hour, between Cyrus’ in-person sit-down with the publication and a follow-up call. Among the many topics discussed with candor: her present-day relationship with each parent (Tish and Billy Ray Cyrus), whether she’s interested in being a parent one day, what happened when she did E.M.D.R. therapy, growing up as a child star and why finally winning her first Grammy (for “Flowers,” in 2024) was so significant, and — when interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro brought up Cyrus’ peers in the industry — her rapport with other female pop stars.

“I find the relationship between female pop stars to be really interesting and often very fraught,” Garcia-Navarro suggested, to which Cyrus joked: “Divas.”

“Is that what you think is happening?” she asked Cyrus.

“I mean, probably on my end,” the singer said, and then clarified, “I don’t mind the word diva. Maybe I’m a little diva.”

Cyrus added, “It’s kind of cool. It’s a fantasy. You don’t have to be famous to be a diva — just be a diva. Diva does not mean difficult for no reason.” When asked whether she thinks she’s difficult, she quipped: “I’m difficult, but not for no reason.”

The interviewer followed up by prompting, “You have said you don’t feel part of the cohort of singers of your generation and age group … You’ve held yourself apart in a certain way.” She asked Cyrus why.

“I don’t think it’s so much of a conscious choice,” Cyrus said. “I think for me, my persona — the public’s idea of me — is ‘on,’ in some way, but in my own time, I’m very off. I like no makeup, my hair up messy. I don’t even look in the mirror in my own time.”

“It’s not that I haven’t found it,” she said. “I haven’t looked very hard. I’m sure girls in my community are going like, ‘Well, that’s me too and you haven’t reached out.’ No, I haven’t … I like doing my two worlds.”

Cyrus related her real life to that of her teenaged Hannah Montana persona.

“Maybe it’s something subconsciously from the show, like from Hannah Montana where I think my famous person has one life and then as a regular person I have another life,” she explained. “I think maybe subconsciously it programmed me — not even joking — to think who I am at home and who I am as a performer are kind of like two separate identities, and actually they are.”

Elsewhere in the conversation the former Disney star talked about the younger generation of pop singers, including Sabrina Carpenter, whom she’s met and sometimes worries about due to the hectic schedule the “Espresso” hitmaker keeps. “Every time I see her I have the urge to ask her if she’s OK. I’ll see she’s performing in Ireland, and then the next day she’s doing a show in Kansas. And I’m like, ‘I don’t know how that could be physically OK,’ because I was in that situation. I know what it feels like to fry yourself, and I don’t want anyone else to get fried. But I like all the new girls. I think they’re all unique and are very found,” Cyrus said.

See her full interview with the New York Times in the video below.