On last year’s much better She Is Coming EP, Cyrus seemed interested in a sound that reconciled the many moods of her career, an aim that’s revisited on Plastic Hearts, Cyrus’s new and seventh solo album. Her reaction, again, was to get as far away from the scene as possible, slamming the sex-positive strip club music she’d pursued overeagerly in the Bangerz era and returning to square one with the squeaky-clean pop-rock of 2 017’s charming (if clinical) reset, Younger Now. Cyrus caught heat in those years as conversations about cultural appropriation challenged white artists adding flavor to their work with approximated Blackness that didn’t feel authentic or appreciative enough of the source material. Experimenting with the Flaming Lips in the Dead Petz year, she sought to drown her pop star image in a glittery, Day-Glo ooze. This restlessness made the Bangerz era cloying in a way that didn’t serve the music. In the drastic swing between between her roots and rock records of the late 2000s and the pop and hip-hop moves she pulled at the beginning of the next decade, there is massive tension between the singer’s pedigree as the daughter of country star Billy Ray Cyrus (and goddaughter to icon Dolly Parton) and her desire to be seen as something, anything else. It’s a question Miley struggled with long after she left the Disney Channel fold. At its core, Hannah Montana was a show about the weight of pop star aspirations and how much one must give of themselves in order to maintain a profile on the charts. Miley Cyrus has been in search of the perfect balance between rock attitude and pop smarts her entire career. 1980 was an embarrassment of riches not unlike 2020, a year so stacked with great rock albums by women that there wasn’t room for men in the nominees for the Grammy for Best Rock Performance. Also waiting in the wings was Stevie Nicks, who came off of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk tour and set about recording the songs she’d release the next year as Bella Donna. Pacific Northwest quartet Seafood Mama enjoyed a local hit in “Harden My Heart,” a showcase for front woman Rindy Ross’s impassioned vocals and sax accompaniment, later changing its name to Quarterflash and entering rotation on the fledgling MTV with a fiery video treatment for the early hit. Breakout artists like Kate Bush and Pat Benatar charted well with the singles “Babooshka” and “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” and impressed audiences with albums - see Kate’s Never for Ever and Pat’s Crimes of Passion - that would help to cement them as essential to that era’s sound. X, Blondie, and the B-52s showed how versatile punk could be, just as much as the Clash’s sprawling triple album Sandinista did. in January and London’s Girlschool, friends of Motörhead, whose debut Demolition is every bit as volatile as anything Lemmy’s group was selling that year. At the same time, the men in metal, post-punk, new wave, and art rock made masterpieces like David Bowie’s Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), AC/DC’s Back in Black, Motörhead’s Ace of Spades, Joy Division’s Closer there were brilliant debut releases from former Runaway Joan Jett, whose self-titled solo album was renamed and reissued the next year as Bad Reputation after its killer opener the Pretenders, whose self-titled debut technically hit America in the final days of 1979 and landed in the U.K. Plastic Hearts is an album both in awe of and in conversation with the classics, whose melodies wear their inspirations proudly.ġ980 was a watershed year for women in rock music.

Plastic hearts album review