If there’s one thing Miley Cyrus wants to make clear, it’s that she’s not the little girl from Hannah Montana anymore. “Yeah, I smoke pot,” she’ll remind you in “Dooo it,” the first song on her surprise album Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Pets—which she continues to do for the next 22 songs, all while focusing on sex, drugs, and outer space. Consumed individually, some songs seem musically and lyrically repetitive. But as a whole, the album is a mindfully orchestrated projection of Miley’s own spiritual journey.
Dead Petz arises from Miley’s most recent hiatus after her pet dog, Floyd, died in 2014; the loss reportedly took a huge toll on the singer. Many songs throughout the album reference Floyd’s death, “The Floyd Song (Sunrise)” being the most explicit tribute. What sounds like off-key, nasally singing at first soon evolves into discordant vocals that emphasize raw grief.
Reeling from her experiences with loss, Miley uses this album to grapple with her understanding of fate and humankind’s status in the cosmos. She covers the whole spectrum of philosophical questions – one second, bemoaning the loneliness that comes with loss on an individual scale in “I Get So Scared,” while next contemplating the Big Bang Theory and human creation in “Milky Milky Milk.” Taken one by one, the countless space references in songs may appear to be associated with drugs, but the huge role that outer space plays in the album is connected to Miley’s understanding that “no one controls what happens in our lives, the universe gets to decide, our future is written up here in the sky.” which she sings in “I Get So Scared.”
The rest of the album jumps between psychedelic space-rock and party jams. In semblance of human nature’s craving for drugs and sex as a distraction from grief, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz jumps from grieving the loss of an animal friend to tracks such as, “I’m so Drunk” and “Fuckin Fucked Up.” 46 and 50 seconds long respectively, these pieces are perfect interludes that distract from the singer’s grief. While longer songs like “Dooo It” go on about drinking and smoking for three minutes, and appear juvenile, these shorter bursts purely capture the nature of such moments.
Nature does remain a powerful metaphor for Miley to express her emotional turmoil across the tracks. Whereas a sunrise is normally a symbol of beauty, it is the arch-nemesis of Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz. The sunrise becomes a motif associated with sadness: the dread of a new day without an old friend. “Tangerine” (ft. Big Sean) bridges the two parts of this album—the hedonistic and the metaphysical—by explaining that Miley’s addiction to the parties stems from her love of the nighttime, the darkness in which she is allowed to wallow in the sadness and the past rather than face the future. Various songs even include the same lyric: “I feel like a slab of butter that is melting in the sun.”
Altogether, Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz is a magnificent combination of the Miley we know and love and a handful of new musical and vocal techniques that attest to her legitimacy as an artist.
Voice’s Choices: “Pablow the Blowfish,” “BB Talk”
