Each of Miley Cyrus’s albums has felt more like a response to—or even a rebuke of—its predecessor than part of a linear creative progression, shifting abruptly from urban-pop (Bangerz) to country-pop (Younger Now) in the span of just a few years. The singer’s 2020 album Plastic Hearts, though, began to give her eclectic discography a through line.
That album followed a series of well-received covers of songs like Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” where Cyrus eschewed the nimbleness of Debbie Harry’s performance in favor of a persistent, gritty belt. Building off her newfound appreciation as a rock vocalist, she laced Plastic Hearts with references to new wave and glam rock, and flaunted her increasingly textured voice.
In keeping with this pattern, Endless Summer Vacation serves as the blissful comedown from the previous album’s high intensity, pairing Cyrus’s rasp with chilled-out contemporary pop arrangements, and with mixed results. The album also tracks a newly single Cyrus’s search for love and, in the process, discovery of both her vulnerability and strength. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is, but the closer Cyrus inches to the volcanic psych-rock style that’s bubbled beneath the surface of her work for close to a decade now, the more she sounds like herself.
The album’s narrative structure can be summed up in three parts: the bliss of single life, a return to the excitement of love, and self-rediscovery. The first act opens with the hit “Flowers,” an easy-listening flip of Bruno Mars’s “When I Was Your Man” featuring an Easter-egg hunt of details from DeuxMoi blind items and, of course, Cyrus’s inimitable voice.
But vocal performance alone can’t elevate the by and large nondescript lyricism of Endless Summer Vacation’s songs. The chorus of “Jaded” soars like the best pop-rock of the aughts, but its lyrics feel one-dimensional: “I’m sorry that you’re jaded/I could’ve taken you places.” Elsewhere, “You” recasts Cyrus as a skilled soul singer, but her characterization as a monogamy-averse troublemaker is too expected to pack its intended emotional punch.
The album’s middle stretch is the most interesting, lyrically and sonically. The synthwave-inspired “River” justifies its central stock metaphor with an enticing, high-stakes chorus worthy of Cyrus’s fierce vocals and personality. And the James Blake-assisted “Violet Chemistry” feels like her answer to Nelly Furtado’s “Say It Right,” not only due to its Timbaland-tinged R&B wooziness, but also because it captures the sensation of physical attraction with a welcome earnestness: “Stay a while, put your arms around me.”
The bawdy “Handstand” is a hard left turn into the more psychedelic territory of 2015’s Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, but with the help of co-writer Harmony Korine, Cyrus comes out on the other side having proven that she’s capable of reconciling her quirks with ear-catching hooks. That hot streak fizzles out, though, with the album’s final few tracks, which are well-performed but fall lyrically flat. Take “Wildcard,” which follows up on “You” with further self-deprecating declarations that Cyrus isn’t made for marriage, but it doesn’t leave much of an impression.
The lyrical clichés that occupy much of Endless Summer Vacation do little to scratch away at the album’s blithe veneer, though at the very least they deliver on its promise of fun. The sole exception is the acoustic ballad “Wonder Woman,” which closes the set on a dejected note: “She’s a wonder woman/She knows what she likes/Never know she’s broken/Only when she cries.” If history is any indication, Cyrus’s next album will bear little resemblance to Endless Summer Vacation. One hopes, at least, that it will be as thematically rich as it is vocally.
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