Which Miley Cyrus Song Are You?

Learn More About Miley Cyrus

Very few performers have had to publicly renegotiate their identity as many times as Miley Cyrus, and fewer still have come out the other side with a catalog that actually holds together. She arrived as a child star playing a girl with a secret double life, which in hindsight is almost too neat a metaphor, and she has spent the two decades since dismantling and rebuilding the public version of herself roughly every three years.

The Hannah Montana era made her one of the most recognizable teenagers on the planet and gave her a fanbase that was, by design, extremely young. What made the following decade so turbulent was not that she changed — every performer does — but that she changed in front of an audience that had been sold a fixed idea of her, and a press corps that treated each shift as a scandal rather than a career.

Bangerz in 2013 was the loudest of those pivots. It produced We Can't Stop and Wrecking Ball, the latter of which became her first number one single in the United States and remains the song most people reach for first. It is worth separating the video, which dominated the conversation at the time, from the vocal, which is genuinely one of the best of her career — a raw, cracked performance that holds up entirely on its own.

What followed was a deliberate scattering of genres. Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz in 2015 was a sprawling psychedelic experiment released for free. Younger Now in 2017 pulled hard toward country and Americana and gave her Malibu, a warm, uncomplicated love song that sounded like nothing she had released before. Plastic Hearts in 2020 leaned into rock and glam and finally put her raspy, cigarette-and-gravel voice in a setting that suited it — collaborations with Joan Jett, Billy Idol, and Stevie Nicks made the case better than any press release could.

Then in 2023 came Flowers, which did something none of the earlier reinventions managed: it made her inescapable again on her own terms. The song broke streaming records, spent eight weeks at number one, and earned her the first Grammy wins of her career, for Record of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance. Used to Be Young, released later that year, worked as its quieter companion — a direct, unguarded look back at the era everyone else spent years having opinions about.

Her more recent work has continued in that reflective register, and she has a new record arriving this month, which means the reinvention cycle is running exactly on schedule. The through line across all of it is the voice, which is genuinely distinctive and has only gotten better as the production around it has gotten less busy.

If pop catalogs are your thing, the site has more — try our Taylor Swift quiz for another artist whose eras became the whole conversation, or browse the rest of our music quizzes.

So which one are you — the anthem, the heartbreak, the love song, the reclamation, or the reckoning? Answer honestly and find out.