Miley Cyrus and Pharrell overview, Doctor (Work It Out): Pop star conquers where a lesser singer would quail

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Miley Cyrus has a knack for making any track her personal. Consider the 31-year-old’s spellbinding rendition of Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” at Glastonbury in 2019, or her transcendent cowl of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” on the Super Bowl Music Fest in 2022. Further proof might be present in her efficiency of Aerosmith’s “Dream On” alongside her fellow judges on The Voice US, or her cowl of “Zombie” by The Cranberries at Whisky a Go Go in 2021.

Some of that is all the way down to the star’s pure charisma, which delighted the Grammys viewers final month when she accepted the award for Record of the Year. It’s additionally largely because of her voice, among the many better of her era despite vocal surgical procedure and trauma attributable to her residence burning down in 2018, an occasion Cyrus mentioned was so devastating that it modified her pure register.

She weaponises these qualities on “Doctor (Work It Out)”, a collaboration with Pharrell – who teased the observe at a latest Louis Vuitton present – that’s rumoured to have been written earlier than the discharge of her 2013 album Bangerz. Back then, Cyrus was a infamous twentysomething wild little one whose headline-making antics incessantly threatened to overshadow her musical abilities. But Bangerz – an erratic however charming amalgamation of pop, dance, nation, digital – did loads of speaking, too.

More than 10 years later, Cyrus proves she will nonetheless conquer where a lesser singer would quail. “Doctor” will not be a torch track like “Wrecking Ball”, neither is it a self-love anthem akin to her 2023 mega-hit “Flowers”. It’s a glam-pop-rock jam, on which Cyrus lets unfastened and invitations you to hitch her, shimmying and simmering, atop Pharrell’s funky bass hook. “I feel like working it out,” she declares over a grinding guitar. “If that’s something you wanna do.”

Its melody and rhythm aren’t dissimilar to “I Wanna Be Your Slave”, the attractive single from Italian Eurovision champions Maneskin. Like them, Cyrus has no qualms when asserting her intentions, purring into the mic: “A midnight medication/ Just show me where it hurts/ I need to rock you baby/ Before your body burns.” Cyrus elevates what might’ve been a forgettable bop, including the thrills and spills with a gasp, a moan, an “oww!!”.

Callbacks to her and Pharrell’s historical past shimmer and sway like the perimeter on Cyrus’s silver Grammys gown. The sly beat of the intro is redolent of the one on “Blurred Lines”, Pharrell’s controversial collaboration with Robin Thicke that dropped the identical yr as Bangerz. And there’s a whisper of his Neptunes side-project NERD within the track’s hi-hat and delicate Latin inflections, as if Cyrus heard “She Wants to Move” and got here again together with her personal proposition.

It’s definitely a tempting one. “Doctor” is delivered flawlessly by two pop masterminds. Who are we to withstand?