Lana Del Rey is standing in a blue-on-white summer dress in front of a wood-panelled house, crying real tears next to plastic weeping willows, momentarily overcome by the size of the audience staring back at her. This sort of tension, the push-pull between genuine vulnerability and an exploration of aesthetics, has always been there in her music, and her wonderfully ambitious first stadium tour runs on it. Its theatrical staging and big ideas are all the more remarkable thanks to some very human moments of doubt.
Opening with Stars Fell on Alabama, one of several new songs foreshadowing a country record that might be around the corner, Del Rey’s voice is barely there, with its final notes followed by a dash to the wings to kiss her husband. But she stays on the rails. During Chemtrails Over the Country Club and Ultraviolence, she falls to the floor in Busby Berkeley-esque arrangements alongside her dancers, her vocals now steely as power chords and pulsing red lights ratchet up the drama.
At the heart of the concert is a remarkable set piece following Quiet in the South. The house starts to burn, its air of Douglas Sirk melodrama and stultifying domesticity tumbling into Hitchcockian mania. A section of Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo score plays and Del Rey answers it with an off-stage recitation from Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, which becomes the intro to Young and Beautiful. It’s bravura stuff, capped by her gradual rise from a secondary stage as the track ends, now clad in a cocktail dress. The crowd comes unglued.
Famously, though, the problem with big swings are the misses. There are a few here, notably a hologram Lana sitting in a window while snippets of Norman Fucking Rockwell and Arcadia ring from the speakers. Aside from wasting two killer songs, it creates an unwanted break in the dialogue she maintains between artist and audience elsewhere – there aren’t many stadium spectacles driven by the gut-level understanding found in Del Rey’s plea to the room during a mesmerising Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd: “Don’t forget me.” Not a chance.
• Touring the UK and Ireland until 4 July 2025
