It’s strange that this week’s biggest album was almost entirely co-written with Jack Antonoff, who also co-wrote most of last week’s biggest album: Taylor Swift’s Lover. The pair could hardly be more different. Swift’s pastel-hued positivity on the zingy Lover feels galaxies away from this stack of smoky slowies, a stunning mood piece that must be Lana Del Rey’s most beautiful collection, six albums in.
While the 34-year-old made a nod towards the present day on her last release, 2017’s Lust for Life with its guest spots from A$AP Rocky and The Weeknd, here the classic references pile up.
The first verse of Bartender alone alludes to Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills & Nash and The Beatles. Warm piano ballad The Greatest makes a lyrical dig at Kanye West but otherwise, as with that sarcastic album title, she’s immersed in the kind of American iconography that has been familiar at a glance for decades.
Musically, it’s unfussy — lots of piano and plucked guitar, with strings lightly scattered and avoiding the overblown pile-on of some past work. That leaves space for her femme-fatale voice to sit close in your ear, painting pictures of in-car trysts on Love Song, boats and beaches on Mariners Apartment Complex, sweaty bars with Hollywood addresses on Happiness Is a Butterfly.
Long-term fans will know not to look for an upbeat one, though she gets unusually psychedelic on the nine-minute Venice Bitch. It all floats by at a stately pace, the beautiful and the damned together.
She has never sounded so exquisite.
