After she descended from a B-stage in the middle of the stands at the Hollywood Bowl on Friday night, Miley Cyrus sat hunched over on the main stage, visibly sapped by the 200-foot trek back to the spotlight. “You guys gave me so much energy, but you also took a little energy out of me, too,” she said. “It is a lot for me, if you could imagine walking from where I was through each of you and feeling how much passion and how much love each of you radiates to me. And I appreciate you so much. But it is a lot for me and it is a little bit overwhelming.”
It’s an admission that a seasoned pop star — one of our biggest and brightest, mind you — would rarely deign to make at their first major show in years. And yet, it felt like the thesis for the first of two concerts Cyrus is performing in Los Angeles in support of her latest album “Bass Persuades,” a record with a few bright moments but lacking the singular vision that defined some of her strongest work. Across the nearly two-hour set, Cyrus appeared at odds with the pressures of being a generational talent, proudly chasing her muse with full-throated renditions of fresher, more opaque material while letting the audience carry the vocals on her biggest hits. It was confounding, oftentimes bizarre and, in the end, strangely entertaining, a snapshot of a megastar who, after all this time, is still figuring out what artist she wants to become.
That’s the thrill for anyone who has followed Cyrus’ career since she emerged as a Disney star with “Hannah Montana,” trying on different styles while navigating the mercurial sound of mainstream pop. She’s shape-shifted at a moment’s notice, chasing massive hits with pivots into deeply unconventional genres and sounds, beginning with her reinventive “Bangerz” era in 2013 and its subsequent global trek, her last extensive tour. Since then, she’s remained prolific and expansive, traipsing from psych-pop (“Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz”) to glam rock (“Plastic Hearts”) and, perhaps not accidentally, stumbling into a few massive hits along the way, with songs like “Wrecking Ball” and “Flowers” that she let the audience carry during the Bowl show.
On Friday night, Cyrus hewed closely to her new material with tracks from “Bass Persuades” and a few from 2025’s wildly ambitious “Something Beautiful.” She’s performed so rarely that nearly half the songs on the setlist were live debuts: Over the past few years, Cyrus staged only two fans-only shows in Los Angeles and Paris, appearances that reinforced her strengths as a performer without heeding to the pressures — interviews, TV appearances, radio drops — that come with it.
Yet Cyrus was quick to ground the show in her reality, one where she’s learned to balance her public and private lives. “For somebody that likes to keep life fun, and likes to jump out of airplanes and be spontaneous, doing the same thing for your entire life can lose its shine if you don’t continue to give yourself that pressure and polish to create something beautiful, which is the life that I’m living,” she said, leading into the title track from “Something Beautiful.”
For Cyrus, that’s meant stretching the boundaries of pop music and, by proxy, pop stardom. All bets were off as she opened with “Orbit,” a very languid ballad about the magnetism of romance. Already the pace was unpredictable, giving way to the zapping synth-pop of “Different Religion” (with featuring and opening act Model/Actriz) and Fentanyl-rejecting “Bass Persuades.” She let her freak flag fly with Flaming Lips’ frontman Wayne Coyne on the B stage for the group’s “Do You Realize??” and their collaboration “Karen Don’t Be Sad,” and strutted across the catwalk at the lip of the stage for “Walk of Fame,” one of the more supermodel songs in her discography.
Amid her musings on fame, she struck a truly emotive moment in remembrance of her godmother Dolly Parton, recalling that the only time she had seen her perform was at the Bowl some years back. “Like so many things Dolly did that I didn’t understand at the time, sitting here with you all right now, feeling her all around me, knowing that she’s right here beside me every day, all the time, more than she could be when she was here, I feel her more than ever,” she said, choking back tears as she led into a cover of “Jolene.” “And knowing that I get to share this story with you all, it makes that night very worth it. This memory is gold to me. Me and Dolly, we are eternal. Nothing in this life could ever tear us apart. And I’m going to see her again, and I can’t fucking wait because I miss her.”
That’s where she felt most at home, belting out those familiar notes of “Jolene” as she’s done so many times before. So it was strange that she largely held the mic towards the crowd for her bigger hits, “We Can’t Stop” and “Party in the U.S.A.,” where Coyne reemerged with a gigantic assortment of balloons that spelled “Fuck Yeah Hollywood Bowl.” Cyrus seemed removed from those tracks, aware of the power they held over the attending crowd while recognizing they had become so woven into the cultural fabric that they no longer belonged just to her.
Perhaps that’s why the first of Cyrus’ shows at the Hollywood Bowl felt so possessive, so intrinsically tied to her recent eras and willing to explore them. There were no traditional dance breaks or wild set pieces to accent the songs; here was Cyrus, 33 years old, coming out on the other end of the hit factory with the freedom to be who she’s meant to be. Whether that’s satisfactory is of little significance when, across two sold-out nights, 18,000 fans are still pining to witness it.