Photo

Miley Cyrus was the host of the MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday night.Credit Danny Moloshok/Reuters

Stories from Our Advertisers

For Miley Cyrus, complete personal and artistic freedom — the kind that allowed her to announce at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday that she was following 2013’s “Bangerz,” her platinum-selling, major label pop album, with 23 sprawling new songs, now streaming free online — is something she’s earned after nearly a decade of fame.

“That’s what I’ve got the luxury to do,” Ms. Cyrus, 22, said at her home studio a week before the show, at which she served as host, enthusiastically goofing on her reputation for provocative costumes, speaking freely and drug use. She used the night to take full advantage of the commercial platform to debut a different, decidedly noncommercial version of herself. “I can just do what I want to do, and make the music I want to make.”

The result is “Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz,” which finds the singer again reimagining her role in culture, blowing out the pop-star liberation narrative of “Bangerz,” and eager to show that what appeared to be a performative, post-Disney, anything-goes ethos is more than a retail strategy — it’s her all-encompassing aesthetic and lifestyle. And while she is operating outside of her label contract, Ms. Cyrus is confident that, given the scope of her influence, enough fans will come along to make this investment in her individual happiness a worthy one.

Continue reading the main story

Listen to ‘Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz’

“Yeah, I smoke pot/ Yeah, I love peace,” Ms. Cyrus screamed during the unannounced V.M.A.s finale, a much-bleeped performance of “Dooo It!,” the album’s raucous opening song, co-written with Wayne Coyne, who produced much of the “Dead Petz” project, and other members of his band, the Flaming Lips. Just don’t get the wrong idea, she warned, shooting glitter from between her legs, surrounded by queens from “RuPaul’s Drag Race”: “I ain’t no hippie.”

In a more than five-hour interview at the Technicolor playland in Studio City where she lives alone, Ms. Cyrus was vibrating with excitement to share her pure, updated view of the world, at one point dancing in her driveway as the new songs — some psychedelic and circular, others straight pop with raw edges — rattled from her modest one-room studio (called “Love Yer Brain” after a Flaming Lips song).

Early in her still-young adult career, “People were like, ‘Well, she’s got some good people twisting the knobs to help her break out,’” Ms. Cyrus said, surrounded by neon wall signs, a unicorn stuffed with rolling papers and an inflatable purple alien. “Now it’s been long enough where they’re like, ‘No one’s telling her what to do.’”

She added, “I’m not a chicken with my head cut off.”

Continue reading the main storySlide Show

2015 MTV Video Music Awards

CreditMario Anzuoni/Reuters

Comfortable but amped up, wearing gray leggings, a black sports bra and a Flaming Lips hoodie, and cursing as though she were in a Tarantino movie, Ms. Cyrus alternated between green juice and green joints as she explained the personal evolution, including death and love like she’d never known, that led to this project.

First came the passing in April 2014 of her beloved dog, Floyd, who was killed by coyotes while the singer was on an eight-month world tour for “Bangerz.” Two weeks later, after bawling through some performances, Ms. Cyrus was hospitalized for more than a week in Kansas with a severe allergic reaction to antibiotics. There she was visited by Mr. Coyne, 54, long one of her musical heroes, with whom she’d recently begun collaborating.

But it wasn’t until she returned home to pursue natural healing that things got “really trippy,” she said. “This is going to sound crazy,” but a Chinese healer “sent me into a state where my dog was lifted out of my lungs and placed on my shoulder,” she explained. “I pet my dog for like three hours,” and after finally telling Floyd she had to “let go and put his energy out,” Ms. Cyrus continued, “I really think, in a way, his energy went into Wayne’s energy. What he was to me, Wayne has become.”

Mr. Coyne, who had first tapped Ms. Cyrus to sing on a cover of The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” a few months earlier, has since served as both a mentor and an artistic enabler.

“Her life, to her, is art,” he said. “If she wants to look this way and say these things, she does it.”

Whereas “Bangerz” saw a freshly unfettered pop renegade experimenting with her newfound power — roiling some with its hip-hop tourism and provocative visuals — the id-heavy experiments of “Dead Petz” reveal Miley as she exists now: aware of her position as a youth-culture spokeswoman, and openly keen on drugs, sex, animals and the environment. “I created my surroundings, my own world,” she said. “What seems like fantasy or trippy, it’s not to me. It’s my actual reality.” (As she sings on “Slab of Butter (Scorpion),” “Self control is not something I’m working on.”)

As for the pace of her reinventions: “It’s really scary,” she said. “If one of my friends doesn’t see me for two or three weeks, you have to re-get to know me in a way. My soul will still be the same, but everything around me can be different, and I won’t dress the same and maybe different kinds of people will be around.”

Unlike other 22-year-olds, when Ms. Cyrus presents her passions, she does it on a mass scale. On the new collection of songs, the clumsy rap signifiers of “Bangerz” are gone, though some of the goofy kitsch remains, as does production from Oren Yoel and Mike WiLL Made-It, the Atlanta producer and lead architect of her last sound, who contributed some of the strongest songs here (“Lighter,” “I Forgive Yiew”). Still, Ms. Cyrus said, “What Mike was to ‘Bangerz,’ Wayne is to this project.”

Slide ShowV.M.A.s 2015: On the Red CarpetCreditJason Merritt/Getty Images (left, center); Larry Busacca/Getty Images

“When I made ‘Bangerz,’ it was as true to me then as this record is now,” Ms. Cyrus said. “It just happened naturally in my head. It’s like anything — styles just change.”

Mike WiLL said he saw in Ms. Cyrus an organic need to regenerate. “Why would she drop another ‘Bangerz’? Miley is the new Madonna,” he said.

In between albums, her personal life changed, too. After years of tabloid-chronicled growing pains, Ms. Cyrus has retreated inward, becoming “more of a homebody,” she said. She spends most days at her house, doing yoga, smoking weed, playing with her many pets (including a massive pig) and making art or music.

While a pop star like Taylor Swift may be gathering “musicians, actresses, models, entrepreneurs,” she said, “I’m not trying to be in the squad.” She continued, “None of my friends are famous and not because of any other reason than I just like real people who are living real lives, because I’m inspired by them.”

Ms. Cyrus has also tried to seize control of her own celebrity narrative, delivering an unvarnished but well-curated version of herself straight to her fans. “I put naked pictures on my Instagram — I don’t care,” she said. “It’s not interesting anymore to see me like that.”

In 2014, Ms. Cyrus founded the Happy Hippie Foundation, a nonprofit for homeless and L.G.B.T. youth, which she said has helped with her self-discovery. “I feel very gender-fluid,” she said. “For a long time I didn’t understand my own sexuality. I would get really frustrated and think I’d never understand what I am, because I can’t even figure out if I’m feeling more like a girl or boy. It took me talking to enough trans people to realize that I didn’t ever have to decide on one.”

Then there is the influence of Mr. Coyne. “He’s everything in the world — you can’t even define us,” Ms. Cyrus said. “I am 100 percent in love with Wayne, and Wayne is in love with me, but it’s nothing sexual in any way. That would be the grossest.”

His presence on the record is most obvious on songs like “Karen Don’t Be Sad” and “The Floyd Song (AKA Sunrise),” which feature electronic zaps and squiggles over acoustic guitar — Flaming Lips songs as sung by Miley Cyrus.

Slide ShowMiley Cyrus’s StyleCreditJosh Haner/The New York Times

But Ms. Cyrus’s natural pop instincts, strong voice and country storytelling often rise above her collaborators’ default modes, ensuring the project won’t slip too far into obscurity. “The thing that keeps it together is me,” Ms. Cyrus said. “It’s not like I get with Wayne and I act one way — cosmic, cosmic — and then I get with Mike and I start rapping on the beat.”

Because she wasn’t aiming for radio, Ms. Cyrus was also free to be more extreme, with her libertine persona. She gets gleefully foul-mouthed and graphic on songs like “BB Talk,” a rambling monologue about an overly affectionate lover, and “Bang Me Box,” a Mike WiLL-produced song about lesbian sex that Ms. Cyrus said was “pretty self-explanatory.”

It was the personal, homemade nature of the project — and Mr. Coyne’s nontraditional career with the Flaming Lips — that persuaded Ms. Cyrus to release it via the streaming site SoundCloud.

She said the album cost about $50,000 to make — “Bangerz” was “a couple million” — although RCA Records, her label, did not contribute to the budget this time around. “They had never heard the record until it was done,” she said, and it won’t count toward fulfilling her multi-album contract.

The label said in a statement: “Miley Cyrus continues to be a groundbreaking artist. She has a strong point of view regarding her art and expressed her desire to share this body of work with her fans directly. RCA Records is pleased to support Miley’s unique musical vision.”

Ms. Cyrus said it’s hard to imagine fitting again into a mainstream mold. “I don’t think I’ll grow that way,” she said. “It seems like it would be backwards.” Her team of advisers, she added, “said they’d never seen someone at my level, especially a woman, have this much freedom. I literally can do whatever I want. It’s insane.”

Still, “This music was not meant to be a rebellion,” she said. “It was meant to be a gift.”

Read more http://rss.nytimes.com/c/34625/f/640350/s/496d6195/sc/28/l/0L0Snytimes0N0C20A150C0A90C0A10Carts0Cmusic0Cmiley0Ecyrus0Eand0Eher0Edead0Epetz0Bhtml0Dpartner0Frss0Gemc0Frss/story01.htm