"Prisoner" is a song by American singer Miley Cyrus featuring English-Albanian singer Dua Lipa. It was released on November 19, 2020, through RCA Records as the second single from Cyrus' seventh studio album Plastic Hearts (2020). It was also included on the re-issue of Lipa's second studio album Future Nostalgia: The Moonlight Edition (2021). It is a dance, dark-pop, dance-punk, dance-rock and glam rock song produced by Andrew Watt and the Monsters & Strangerz.
The music video was released on the same day as the single and was co-directed by Cyrus and Alana O'Herlihy. It features the singers driving a tour bus and draws references to the films The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Female Trouble. "Prisoner" received mostly positive reviews from music critics, though some of them deemed it one of the weaker moments of the album. The song reached number one in Bulgaria, Croatia, and Malta, the top ten in ten additional countries, and the top forty in nineteen additional countries. It also peaked at number 12 on the Billboard Global 200 and number 54 on the US Billboard Hot 100.
Background and release
Following the October 2019 release of her single "Don't Start Now", Dua Lipa confirmed that she and Miley Cyrus were planning on recording a collaboration. In May of the following year, Lipa stated that she and Cyrus had decided to scrap their collaboration and record something different. On September 14, 2020, Cyrus confirmed the collaboration with Lipa and that it would be included on her seventh studio album, Plastic Hearts. At the beginning of October, after being spotted shooting a video together in New York City, rumblings that Cyrus and Lipa were working on a secret project got even bigger. In an interview with Spanish radio station Cadena 100 on October 13, 2020, Cyrus stated that due to her and Lipa's fans "begging" for their collaboration to be released, they "[could] expect something pretty soon". On November 13, 2020, Cyrus announced the song's title as "Prisoner", along with the Plastic Hearts track listing reveal. Cyrus began teasing the single in a series of tweets where she confirmed its release and posted videos of her fans reacting to its music video. Cyrus and Lipa announced the release of the song on November 18, 2020. The song was released on November 19. The song was written by the two singers alongside Andrew Wotman, Jordan K. Johnson, Marcus Lomax, Stefan Johnson, Ali Tamposi, Jonathan Bellion, Michael Pollack with production from Andrew Watt and The Monsters & Strangerz. The song was engineered at Gold Tooth Music in Los Angeles and Glenwood Studios in Burbank, California. Mixing took place at MixStar Studios in Virginia Beach, Virginia while the mastering was done at Sterling Sound in New York City. "Prisoner" was later included in Lipa's 2021 reissue of her Future Nostalgia album, titled The Moonlight Edition.
In an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music, Cyrus said they had worked on other songs together in the past and praised Lipa:
Composition and lyrics
Cyrus described "Prisoner" as a perfect blend of her and Lipa's styles. It is a dance, dark-pop, disco-punk, disco-rock, glam rock and nu-disco track with a length of two minutes and forty nine seconds. The song's chorus interpolates the melody from Olivia Newton-John's 1981 single "Physical". Earlier in 2020, the track was already sampled by Dua Lipa in her own song, also called "Physical". "Prisoner" was composed using in the key of E minor, with a moderately-fast tempo of 126–132 beats per minute. Cyrus' and Lipa's vocals range from the low note of B3 to the high note of C5.
The lyrics to "Prisoner" relate to angst inspired by isolation feelings and were described by critics as a "heartache anthem" and a "glam declaration of independence". In an article about the song's lyrics for Elle, Alyssa Bailey described the track as "a dark song that captures what it's like to be trapped in an unhealthy, manipulative relationship where their partner keeps pulling them back". Some parallels can be drawn between the lyrics to "Prisoner" and Cyrus' old songs. The verse: "I try to replace it with the city lights" is an allusion to Cyrus' 2019 song "Slide Away", about her separation from then-husband Liam Hemsworth, on which she sings: "So won't you slide away?/Back to the ocean, I'll go back to the city lights". Another reference to an old Cyrus song can be found in the pre-chorus where she sings: "You keep making it harder to stay", which is a contrast to the lyrics to her 2010 song "Stay" that contains the lyric "And if you ask me, I will stay".