Let’s not overcomplicate things here. The beautiful something on Miley Cyrus’s ninth album, “Something Beautiful,” is her voice, straight up. Somewhere between “Party in the U.S.A.,” that gob of immortal bubblegum that made Cyrus the patron saint of children’s birthday party music, and “Flowers,” the adult self-reliance anthem that won her a Grammy last year, her voice has become a thing of tremendous expression and range. At the bottom of her register, she’s like Stevie Nicks after midnight. Up high, more like Tina Turner on the Fourth of July. But down the middle, Cyrus now sounds very much like herself, turning out words in impossible combinations of syrup and sandpaper. The greatest pop songwriters alive should be lined up outside her house seven days a week, fighting to get their lyrics sung in her timbres.

Maybe she just isn’t answering the door. In interviews, Cyrus has said she feels deeply validated by the shiny new Grammy she won for “Flowers,” so it stands to reason that she would continue her quest into the greener pastures of inspo-disco. “Something Beautiful” feels like a mature album intended to be sung by a mature voice: mid-tempo, maximally produced, high on emotion, low on personality, all centered around a mushy omni-concept that the 32-year-old says includes life, death, love, nature and the healing power of music to save our sicko society. She isn’t the first grandeur-minded pop star of her generation to wander into that Bermuda Triangle. Some find their way out (Lady Gaga). Others never escape (Katy Perry).

And while she doesn’t sound completely trapped, the lack of character in these songs is disorienting, especially when you consider the amount of finesse Cyrus brings to her every exhalation. On “More to Lose,” she describes her bad decisions in a fabulously breathy turn of phrase — “I throw away my mind” — but the ethereal instrumentation surrounding her feels movie trailer mawkish. Is that the tension we’re hearing in Cyrus’s voice? Her resistance to being swept away by the schmaltz? Other times, words get in the way. On “Reborn,” an epic standout on the album’s more alert second half, an awkward clump of self-help speak spoils an otherwise euphoric dance floor mantra: “If heaven exists, I’ve been there before/ Kill my ego, let’s be reborn.”

The album’s most compelling cut, “End of the World,” is a gust of magic-hour folk-pop that would threaten to vanish into a Coachella sunset were it not for Cyrus reminding us of her copious vocal gifts. “Let’s go to Paris, I don’t care if we get lost in the scene,” she sings. “Paint the city like Picasso would’ve done in his dreams.” On paper, that’s a lyric that shows its stitchwork, but in song, Cyrus makes it move like a melodized breeze.

That said, trust your panic response when she settles into the song’s end-times refrain, calm and carefree: “Let’s pretend it’s not the end of the world.” If we try to plot “End of the World” on a trajectory with, say, Prince’s “1999” and Britney Spears’s “Till the World Ends,” this album is suddenly springing a question that feels as harrowing as it does unintentional: Over time, are playfully apocalyptic pop songs helping us grow more comfortable with the possibility of our own annihilation?

For now, Cyrus sounds far more concerned with pursuing ego death on her therapist’s couch than pondering a mass extinction event out in the streets. She’s achieved a new kind of mastery inside her success bubble, but as fantastic as she sounds, it’s easy to feel that her greatest work is still ahead of her. Let’s hope we all get to hear it before doomsday.