How Miley Cyrus got her groove back

A decade and a half after she started making records — first as her Disney Channel alter ego, Hannah Montana, then as herself — Miley Cyrus on her eighth studio album sounds like a woman looking back at everywhere she’s been, both musically and emotionally, and assessing where all her travels have put her now, newly divorced and having just entered her 30s. Like the actor she is, Cyrus in the past used each of her albums to explore a single genre: hip-hop on “Bangerz,” psychedelia on “Her Dead Petz,” country music on “Younger Now” — remember that before she was a Disney kid she was the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus — and hard rock on “Plastic Hearts.” Yet “Endless Summer Vacation” jams together bits of all that stuff as she moves through heartbreak to savor the clarity that follows. Brandi Carlile shows up to belt alongside Cyrus in the blippy-folky “Thousand Miles,” but she hangs back in the mix, limiting herself to ghostly high harmonies against Cyrus’ low growl. “River” and “Violet Chemistry” are the album’s most rhythmic cuts, with Cyrus doling out quick staccato lines amid ravey synths played in part in the latter by James Blake. Indeed, her singing is vivid enough on “Endless Summer Vacation” to make up for some mushy songwriting here and there: “Fingers start to dance along the figures and the shapes,” goes one line in “Violet Chemistry,” “mixing all the colors like we’re making a Monet.” But to get too hung up on a cringey lyric is to miss the point of Miley Cyrus at this phase of her weird, winding, one-of-one career.