Miley Cyrus and Pharrell Williams have brought it back to 2013 with their new collab.
Cyrus, 31, and Williams, 50, released “Doctor (Work It Out) on Friday, March 1, teaming up for the first time since Bangerz by resurrecting one of the songs left off Miley’s seminal album. Cyrus sings against the dance-pop bop’s thumping bassline and voluminous production, proclaiming how she “Could be your doctor / And I could be your nurse.”
While the song is full of innuendo, Cyrus makes it clear what this is all about. “Are you on the fence? / I’ll slip but I won’t slide,” she sings on the bridge. “Don’t gotta be forever / Just together for the night.”
Though a decade has passed since Bangerz, this song hasn’t shed its initial production. “Doctor (Work It Out)” feels like it came from the early 2010s with a slightly updated tweak. It’s sonically the cousin to his other hits of that year: Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky,” Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and Williams’ own massive hit “Happy.”
In January, Cyrus and Williams previewed the song during the Louis Vuitton Men’s Fall-Winter 2024 Collection presentation in Paris. On February 28, Cyrus shared a snippet of the video to her Instagram, showing a clip of her dancing with the same big hair and a similarly fringed dress that she wore to the 2024 Grammy Awards.
Miley and Williams spoke with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe about the collaboration in an interview released the same day as “Doctor (Work It Out).” Miley said that Williams was pivotal in Bangerz’s creation, which helped her shed the Disney Channel starlet image she cultivated with Hannah Montana.
“He really was the only one that I could kind of tell him what I really wanted, what I really wanted to make, who I really wanted to be, what I really wanted to do,” she said. “Pharrell was perfect because it was almost like he could be a bumper for me, but he wasn’t going to be a bridle.”
“I’ll never forget just meeting her at a time where people had pegged her to be one thing particularly,” said Williams. “She was Hannah Montana at the time, and she was growing up and really wanting to experience life no matter how far the precipice was. I just remember her just being in a place where no one really understood what she was, and I got it.”
Cyrus said she was glad they waited to release “Doctor (Work It Out)” because the song “embodies my spirit and my essence at this exact moment.” Cyrus returned to a dance-pop sound on 2023’s Endless Summer Vacation, an album that won the “Flowers” singer her first two Grammys at the 2024 awards show: Best Pop Vocal Performance and Record of the Year.
