So please don’t break it just because you can.
[Video][Website]
[5.88]
Will Adams: Seemingly a nod to ground zero of when Cyrus made her turn into Serious Artistry, “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” is less Joanne than it is a deep house remix of “Jolene.” Except that remix already exists, and has the added benefit of being “Jolene,” which this does not.
[5]
Iain Mew: A Star is Born worked out, but apparently elevating the Mark Ronson credit on “Sinner’s Prayer” could have done it too.
[6]
Tobi Tella: It’s been a little while, so it’s time for another Real Miley Cyrus, Making The Music I’ve Always Wanted To. However, if she’s picking a direction to go in, this isn’t bad at all! Her voice has always suited country well, and Mark Ronson’s country-disco producion makes it so it’s not the slog much of Younger Now was. The music video is good if heavy-handed, but hey, we all know how much worse it could be…
[7]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: Miley Cyrus sounds a smidgen unnatural at points, but it’s hard to imagine something that better suits her voice than this low-key country disco tune. As she sings a subtly addicting topline, the reverb and arrangement of strings make it seem like a strong wind is blowing. “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” consequently sounds lonely, like she’s standing alone, ready to accept the breakup that awaits her: “Nothing gon’ save us now.” Not sure I believe her when she sings it, but I want to.
[6]
Stephen Eisermann: This folksy, more organic sounding, country-tinged dance-pop does work better for Miley’s voice than most of her material, but this song still sounds more like filler or an introductory track, rather than the mega single it so badly wants to be. Like the first draft of so much of my writing, the pieces are there but there is still a lot of room for improvement.
[5]
Ryo Miyauchi: “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” aims for capital-E Epic but ultimately rings hollow. Mark Ronson adds string arrangements like a music cue for primetime TV while Miley gives an emotionally detached performance that delivers longing and heartbreak in only the vaguest sense. The two manages to sneak in a curious little line — “we were drunk in love in Tennessee” — though they don’t care much beyond scene-setting to tease it further into something more personal.
[5]
Jonathan Bradley: Like DJ Khaled, Mark Ronson’s greatest talent is his Rolodex. That’s not nothing, and hooking up with Miley Cyrus for a gothic western is an inspired idea, even if it only evinces shades of the clammy Ennio Morricone twilight it hints at. Cyrus shows signs of wanting to enter the weirder thickets of the sound, and she apportions her syllables with appropriate weight, declaiming “things fall apart” as if it had a gloom loosed entirely from Yeats. Ronson, however, tends to gesture at ideas rather than inhabit the spaces that build up around them, and while that works fantastically with a master of pastiche like Bruno Mars, it only holds Miley back.
[7]
Edward Okulicz: I assume Miley Cyrus remembers to send a nice present to her godmother Dolly every year, and maybe she should send an extremely large one this year, because parts of the verse to this lean hard into “Jolene” — not just the melody, but the whole strength-in-the-face-of-emotional-pain thing. It’s shtick, but it suits Cyrus well, though at the end of singing it, I imagine she just went and counted her money rather than feeling drained or emotionally spent. I’d like to hear her shred properly. Maybe the problem is that Ronson’s whistle-clean production with sad Western movie strings really needs a coat of dirt on it. Everything he does just sounds opulent by default, and this is a nice song but it’s not the massive event Ronson’s tried to produce it as. I think these two together could potentially be a really good songwriting team, but I’d get in a co-producer.
[6]