She dropped her last name three weeks before the album came out, and the first video from it is a black-and-white hotel weekend with the man she is marrying.
A song called Let’s Get Married arrived from an artist who had just removed half her own name. On August 31, 2026, Miley Cyrus posted a photograph teasing a new project and began presenting herself simply as Miley. The next day she announced Bass Persuades, her tenth studio album and her first for Atlantic Records after leaving Columbia. The video for Let’s Get Married premiered on September 17 at 9 p.m. Pacific, hours before the album itself.
The video is shot in black and white and set at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood. It follows her and her fiancé, the musician and producer Maxx Morando, checking in and spending the weekend there with friends, and it plays less like a concept piece than like footage somebody happened to be shooting. She and Morando have been together since 2021 and became engaged late in 2025.
That immediacy is the whole design of the record. She has said it took less than a year from starting the album to putting it out, and she has been open about her impatience with long rollouts. Back in June 2025, days after releasing Something Beautiful, she had already chosen twelve songs for the follow-up and sequenced them on a private playlist. Let’s Get Married is the third track and the second single, after the title song, which Atlantic released on September 3 and which set the album’s dance-floor direction with eighties-style synthesizers and a four-on-the-floor pulse.
She has described Bass Persuades as a love story with several layers, one about Morando and one about her relationship with herself, and explained the title as covering a full heart, heartache, and everything between the two. Ten tracks, with the New York band Model/Actriz on Different Religion and Andrew Wyatt of Miike Snow on Neon Signs.
The name, and the loss behind it
The name change drew its own reading. Her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, responded publicly by noting that he had performed as simply Cyrus before Achy Breaky Heart made his full name famous in 1992, and that he had always called his daughter Miley. Her label has framed the album as a chapter honoring the influence of her godmother, Dolly Parton.
Parton died in Nashville on August 25, 2026, at 80, weeks before the album arrived. Miley wrote afterward that one of their last conversations had been about music and change, and that Parton would have wanted her to feel it, write about it, and keep going. Nothing on the record was made in response to that loss, since the album was finished before it happened, but it reaches listeners in its shadow.
She returns to American stages in October, headlining the Hollywood Bowl on the 16th and the 18th, with Model/Actriz opening both nights. They will be her first full concerts in the United States since 2021. That is the argument the whole rollout makes: an album written, recorded, and released inside a single year, a video that looks like a weekend somebody filmed, and a name shortened to the one people actually use. The record is trying to arrive at the same speed as the life it describes.
