Nothing Breaks Like a Heart
This is Mark Ronson learning how to make pop music again. The song has flamenco guitar in it, almost country, something that shouldn’t work but does. Miley Cyrus sings it like she’s finally stopped performing surprise at her own existence—her voice has weight now, something hard underneath the melody. They put it together in late 2018, which is a specific moment for both of them, though I didn’t understand why until I’d heard it a few times.
Mark had been quiet by then. Not inactive—he’d cycled through collaborations, worked with McCartney and Gaga and Adele, the usual string of famous people. But quiet in that way where you’re not sure what you’re actually making, just that it exists somewhere behind the scenes. This announcement felt like he was actually trying again.
The song itself is simple. It’s about heartbreak in that timeless pop way, nothing you haven’t heard before, but Ronson knows how to arrange it so it feels true. The production is clean without being cold. There’s space in it. Cyrus doesn’t oversell anything. You hear her thinking while she’s singing, which is rare.
They shot the video in Kyiv. Strange choice for a pop song about loss—you’d expect Los Angeles, somewhere glossy. Instead it’s Eastern Europe, slightly off-kilter locations, and her in the middle of it looking like she’s thinking about something you won’t understand. The aesthetic is deliberate, which means Ronson probably insisted on it.
I don’t know if this song mattered beyond the moment. It probably did for some people, the ones who process feeling through pop music. For the rest of us it was just something there, that you heard and forgot. But it’s good. It’s what Mark Ronson does when he’s paying attention—fits something real inside the commercial form, makes it sound effortless. That’s a skill that doesn’t look like much until you try it.
By then she’d cycled through enough versions of herself that you couldn’t trust any of them. Maybe that was the point. In this one she sounds honest, at least.