Dreams of Californication Miley hopped off the plane at LAX and never looked back. Her new album seals it.

IN THE PAST DECADE ON THE RUN from her own perception, Miley Cyrus shape-shifted her way through fantastic achievements and exacting dilemmas, going to great lengths to express that she knew how to party back when everyone had her pegged as the squeaky-clean Disney kid.

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Then, when that posturing started to rub people the wrong way, she dived into psychedelia with the Flaming Lips. Ever eager to prove how delightfully weird or reassuringly trad she is from one era to the next, she felt calculated and hard to pin down musically. This perfectly suited a pop career full of surprises but created suspicions about her intentions as a visitor to the far-reaching subgenres her albums wandered through. A good bit of that drift is completely germane to sticking a microphone in anyone's face at various points in their teens and 20s, when we figure ourselves out one mistake at a time.

But some of it seemed to communicate that Cyrus simply thrives on throwing us off and winning us over once again. Last spring's Attention: Miley Live-largely a document of her performance at the 2022 Super Bowl Music Fest-offers a clinic in the singer-songwriter's dueling urges to impress and confuse a crowd. After a jarring opening stretch that zooms through a mash-up of Bangerz hits and altrock covers, Cyrus pauses to address the audience, joking that surely many of them showed up a little too early for headliner Green Day and happened into the spectacle of her set. She thanks fans for bearing with "all of those identities that I was trying on and seeing if they fit me," stressing that at the root of every experiment was honesty.