Miley Cyrus is heading into her next album cycle. Fans have spotted billboards across New York City and Los Angeles courtesy of Spotify that seem to be teasing new music from an unspecified artist. The sole image is a red closeup of one eye with the statement “coming soon”. Miley fans can recognize those eyes in the image anywhere – it’s her.

Adding further fuel to the fire is Mert Alas, Miley’s creative director. He shared a photo of the billboards on his Instagram story with the caption “coming soon”. So it looks like her tenth studio album is upon us, and she wants us to meet her under the red lights. The aesthetic for the era seems to be red and black and is both a little dark and dangerous, two key ingredients for a bad girl pop record.

This new teaser comes just a few weeks after she announced that she had signed a brand new record deal with Atlantic Records. After her last project Something Beautiful underperformed, it seems that she’s approaching her next album with a new team. That album was OK, not particularly bad or good, some standouts yes, but overall there seemed to be a disconnect between the fans and the music. This iconic video of Miley saying her Aunt Dolly told her there were “no hits” lives rent free in my mind.

Word is she’s focusing on creating a straight up pop record, although with Miley you know there’s always more to the sound. She recently appeared on the cover of Wonderland for their summer issue where she discusses the new deal and the next chapter in her career. The cover was dropped the same day as the news of the new record deal, so it was all very calculated and old school in the marketing department. She also looks sickening in the promo images from that shoot which fans believe are the same set of images used for the billboards.

No official release date has been announced yet for the new music, but online theorists are now thinking there’s a chance it might not be coming as “soon” as first intended with the news of Dolly Parton’s passing coming only a few hours after the billboards for Miley’s project started popping up. At the time of writing, Miley hasn’t publicly spoken about Dolly, but given their close relationship over the years, she is the first person that many of us are thinking of in this time. That’s her godmother after all.

August 25th is a significant date for Miley which she has spoken about before. A resurfaced interview from 2023 shows her explaining just that. It’s the date she released “Wrecking Ball” and performed at the VMAs, it’s her father Billy Ray’s birthday, and now is also the day her mentor passed. One thing that comes to mind is that their connection mirrors that of Brandy and Whitney Houston. If Dolly was Miley’s Godmother, Whitney was Brandy’s Fairy Godmother. Both mentors passed on significant dates (Whitney died on Brandy’s birthday). On one hand, yes this could make Miley delay the entire new project in lieu of time to grieve. On the other hand, maybe Miley moving forward with her art would be what Dolly would have wanted? That’s what happened in Brandy’s case, and she named her album of that time Two Eleven, after that very date.

Miley has been talking about this album as far back as last summer on a podcast interview when she was promoting Something Beautiful, and that the music was already done at that point. With that in mind, it’s clear that she has had tons of time to sit with this project and release it on her terms.

Here is Miley out in LA the other night with her mom and sister.

Miley Cyrus out for dinner in LA with mother Tish and sister Noah, August 19, 2026

 

Photo credits: Daily Stardust/BACKGRID

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