Columbia
Pop, 2023

While using music as a big middle finger to exes isn’t anything new, dear Miley Cyrus’s use of Endless Summer Vacation to give the biggest eff you to her ex Liam Hemsworth is actually quite impressive.

The opening single Flowers, for example, is full of meta references to her time with that guy, with the song being in fact an inversion of Bruno Mars’s When I Was Your Man, which also happened to be the couple’s special song before they parted ways. Even better, so many gossip channels on social media seem to independently come to be able to pinpoint these meta references—a coincidence, I’m sure—and spread the tea far and wide.

Therefore, the only dirt on Ms Cyrus’s hands is her people releasing that single on Mr Hemsworth’s birthday.

The whole thing is so sneaky, I have to admire the darling’s strategy skills!

As for the rest of the songs here, well, the dear darling may claim that the songs are manifestations of her mental state after her divorce, but what this means is that the songs here have the predictable messages straight out of a divorcée’s playbook:

• I’m a strong woman and I’ll get over you.
• In fact, I’m already over you—watch me do a manic rain dance in a unbuttoned shirt with no bra as the evidence that I’m really totally over you.
• I feel so sorry for you, because you’re never getting this hot honey ever again.
• Bitch, I’m lonely. Love sucks. I’m now driving around town in a fancy car, shades, and scarf around my neck as I hope I’d be stopped by a hot cop or something.
• You must be lonely and sad too, haha, and no, I’m not projecting. Fuck you, I’m happy and singing about it, so everyone can tell.
• I’ve got a new man now and he’s totally impressed by my awesome sex skills. Bet you miss that. Oh, and he has a bigger dick than you.
• I kinda miss you, but it’s your fault we’re done for. I can’t control you and you are an unreasonable douche, but I kinda miss you.
• Wait, forget that. Yes, I’m now over you. This album is evidence of that, like, totally.

While the stories in the songs are predictable—then again, love and break-ups can be like that, too—but some songs stand out.

Thousand Miles, Ms Cyrus’s collaboration with Brandi Carlile, is the most country of the songs here, and it’s also the most melancholic and darkly haunting tune of the lot. The vocals ache with buried hurt, and the harmonica only underscores the bitter kind of sorrow that the heart is flowing with as the darling drives around town while trying to sort out all those tumultuous feelings about her divorce, her past, and her mistakes.

I look in the rear-view, I was talking to you ’fore I realize
This madness before the sadness
Oh, I pick up the phone and I call back home, but all I get is a dial tone
And instead of hangin’ up, I hang my head

In the end, she decides that the past doesn’t matter, she’s driving so she will look ahead to her next destination.

Handstand is the most “house” song and it is more at home in Ms Cyrus’s more experimental albums compared to the rest of the songs here, which are more soft adult contemporary or country-lite in nature. The lyrics are full of amusing double entendres and innuendos, with a spoken verse and a chorus that relies more on the whizzes and squeaks of the background track than anything else. The whole thing is like a look into the darling’s mind after she’s had her fun with weed, and it’s an adorable experience.

While the rest of the songs aren’t bad at all, I also find that they are kind of predictable.

Take the lead single Flowers for example. After the first verse and chorus, I’ve heard the entire song already because the rest of it is just the verse and chorus in a loop with the bridge breaking up the monotony somewhere in between. Many of the other songs on this album are like that. While they aren’t particularly long, my attention begins to drift shortly after the song has moved pass its first chorus.

Still, these songs aren’t bad. Songs such as the second single River—easily the most 1980s-sounding song of the lot, in a good way—and Violet Chemistry have catchy choruses; it’s just that these songs quickly settle into a predictable pattern and I wish I am caught off-guard and taken by surprise a bit more often.

Speaking of which, is it just me or Violet Chemistry sounds a lot like something Taylor Swift would come up with? The vocal stylistic, the chord progression, the pattern of repeating a certain line over and over into a refrain are all so TayTay.

All in all, this is an alright album. Ms Cyrus’s often underrated vocal delivery in these songs easily convinces me that this is her most adult album to date, as for once, the pain and the melancholy feel authentic and genuine in many of these songs.

So yes, Ms Cyrus has grown-up. It’s just quite disappointing that, from a voyeuristic point of view, this heartbreaking process is tad predictable in its following of the trajectory of many other break-up albums from young pop tarts acting like they are the first in the world to have a broken relationship and they have to share every feeling of theirs with the world.