Records
Indie Folk, 2025
If Noah Cyrus’s debut album was like a raw confessional session, the rather morbidly titled I Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me has more of a revival tent feel.
Overall, she still comes off as tad bittersweet, but she also seems more at peace with her life, and it shows in the music. There are no upbeat earworms here, just smooth and gentle tunes that go with the flow rather than creating turbulence.
Hence, songs like I Saw the Mountains and Apple Tree kind of just wash over the senses like some oddly calming ear balm that will likely need a few listens to remember the melody, but the experience has a weird kind of resonance, like a revival tent experience that I mentioned earlier. These songs have country DNA but at the same time, it’s also infused with indie folk and Americana elements that gives them a “far side of country” feel.
The closest she gets to radio-friendly country songs are What It’s For, Way of the World with Ella Langley, and New Country with Blake Shelton, and these are all solid songs. The last song especially seems to be telling a story that is close to Ms Cyrus:
It gets lonely, it gets so hard
To know where you are goin’ when you don’t know where you are
All these eyes on you, waiting on you to fall
‘Cause the box they put you in just don’t fit you anymore
The best song here is undoubtedly Don’t Put It All on Me, written by her brother Braison Cyrus and performed with Fleet Foxes.
That song is a deceptively pretty, sad pop ballad that on the surface feels like it could be about a relationship. However, if one knows of the context of the messy Cyrus family dynamic, it reads like a message in a bottle between two kids raised in the same sinking ship.
All waves with no ocean
I’m swallowed by the sea
It’s almost poetry in how the song perfectly captures what it feels like to live in a world of constant turbulence, drama, and spectacle… with no grounding, no stability. It’s motion without meaning. Noise without nurture. Those caught in the chaos drown in it while the parents that are supposed to protect them are too busy looking for the next headline.
The fact that her brother wrote it makes it hit even harder, because it’s like two siblings quietly acknowledging their shared trauma in the only language they know — music.
This album is also noteworthy in that it presents a cohesive and coherent sound, as if Noah Cyrus — who is also credited as co-writer and co-producer on every song — has finally found a musical direction that she can slip on comfortably.
In the past, she had experimented with a diverse array of artists and did everything from teen pop to country, and the results were an album and a few EPs that sounded like she was throwing everything at the wall to see which one sticks the best. Here, she sounded more confident and even comfortable in these songs.
So, all in all, this is a bit of a slow burn of an album, but it’s a great kind of slow burn as it continues to present a deeper insight into Noah Cyrus’s personal and musical journey, only this time, she sounds like she has finally found a musical identity and direction she can comfortably and confidently call hers.
In a way, this album feels like a kind of homecoming, so… welcome, Noah Cyrus?
