The visual lands less than two weeks after Bass Persuades gave Cyrus her first Billboard No. 1 album in over a decade.
Miley Cyrus dropped the official video for "Different Religion" on Wednesday, barely two weeks after her tenth studio album, Bass Persuades, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. It's her first chart-topping record in more than ten years.
The track, second on the album, features Model/Actriz frontman Cole Haden on vocals. Photographer-turned-director Mert Alas shot the visual, continuing a run with Cyrus that already includes clips for "Let's Get Married" and the title track "Bass Persuades." He's effectively become the house visual artist of this era.
Lyrically, "Different Religion" leans hard into religious language to talk about wanting somebody badly. Heaven, Jesus, angels, all of it gets folded into descriptions of attraction and intimacy, with the lover cast as something close to a deity. "I want to be saved by a different religion, I crave to believe him," Cyrus sings at one point. The twist is that this new faith comes with no guilt attached. She and the song's subject, per the lyrics, don't need forgiveness.
So it's less a love song and more a song about devotion, the kind usually reserved for belief systems, redirected entirely at desire.
Cyrus spoke to Zane Lowe about where the track sits inside the record. She said "Different Religion" and another song, "Orbit," were written the same day, both circling the same idea: what her dream relationship actually looks like. Her answer, by her own account, isn't simple domestic comfort. She wants the stability and the happy ending, sure, but she also wants the relationship to feel a little bit dangerous.
That tension shows up in the sound too. Cyrus told Lowe that Model/Actriz is one of her favorite bands, and that working with them pushed "Different Religion" toward something rougher than her usual register. She described the track as carrying more rawness and aggression than the dreamy, ethereal production she tends to gravitate toward.
The writing credits are stacked. Cyrus shares them with Haden, Jack Wetmore, Aaron Shapiro, Ruben Radlauer, Kid Harpoon and Michael Pollack. Production duties go to Cyrus, Kid Harpoon and Model/Actriz, with additional production from Michael Pollack and Maxx Morando, Cyrus's fiancé, who worked alongside her across the whole album.
"Different Religion" first arrived with Bass Persuades on September 18. Cyrus's Billboard 200 run suggests this era still has distance left to travel, and if the pattern holds, Mert Alas likely isn't done shooting it yet.
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