Miley Cyrus drops her surname and goes mononymous ahead of a tenth album

Miley Cyrus dropped her last name across her social accounts, going by Miley alone, a day before confirming that her tenth studio album was on the way. The pop star has not formally announced that the change is permanent, which is roughly the position her team seems happy to leave it in.

The signals stacked up quickly. Her official website was refreshed with new imagery and prominent MILEY branding with Cyrus nowhere on it. She posted a new profile shot on Instagram, lit red and wearing an oversized Saint Laurent faux fur coat, captioned only with her first name. On the Sunday, a red poster carrying her face, her website address and an all-caps MILEY wrapped the print edition of the Los Angeles Times.

Going mononymous puts her in a line that runs through Cher, Madonna, Prince and Beyonce, and it lands at a moment when the rest of her professional situation has already changed. She signed to Atlantic Records from Columbia earlier this year, and Bass Persuades is the first release under that deal.

She has described the album itself as a love story with layers rather than a single thread. "This album is a love story, but love stories are never one-dimensional. They're always layered," she told Wonderland magazine, adding that a peaceful kind of love has become a theme across her last three records, including the love she has found for herself.

Some of that is biographical. She and Maxx Morando, her partner of more than four years, announced their engagement in December, and she has said that once her relationship with herself changed, every relationship around her changed too.

She had also flagged a shift the week before, in her tribute to her godmother Dolly Parton. Writing after Parton's death at 80, she said one of their last conversations had been about music and metamorphosis, which reads differently now that a name change and a new pop record have followed it. Bass Persuades is dated for Sept. 18 on the release calendar.