Three Years of Side Gigs, Then Miley Cyrus in Kyiv

Mark Ronson spent the three years after Uptown Special doing what any reasonable person would do after producing one of the biggest songs of the decade: worked with everyone. A$AP Rocky, Duran Duran, Paul McCartney, Lady Gaga, Adele, Dua Lipa, Queens of the Stone Age. A credit here, a collaboration there. You don’t rush the follow-up to "Uptown Funk."

That song—made with Bruno Mars in 2015, winner of a BRIT Award and two Grammys, eleven million copies sold worldwide—was the kind of hit that makes everything after it complicated. It was inescapable in a way that few pop records manage, the sort of thing that gets into the walls. Ronson, to his credit, didn’t try to immediately replicate it. He disappeared into other people’s projects instead and took his time.

Now comes "Nothing Breaks Like A Heart," his first proper single since then, and his partner is Miley Cyrus—who has been in a fascinating phase of her career for a while now, capable of anything, prone to surprising you. The song has country in its bones and something that sounds faintly like flamenco buried under the pop arrangement. It works. The video was shot in Kyiv, and Miley is in it, looking exactly as good as you’d expect. Ronson and Cyrus are both professionals who know what they’re doing, and this sounds like proof of it.