Lana Del Rey gets personal on new album
Lana Del Rey’s sprawling and obsessive new LP — “the ninth studio album,” as its cover describes it in a flourish of self-mythologizing graphic design — is the one where this great American collage artist begins cut-and-pasting herself.
And why not? At age 37, Del Rey has ascended to a level of prestige that for her younger inheritors — including famous fans like Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo — more or less matches the esteem in which she holds those in her pantheon; what’s more, she’s almost equally revered by musicians from the generation before hers: Stevie Nicks, who appeared on Del Rey’s 2017 “Lust for Life”; Cat Power, who’s covered her “White Mustang”; and Courtney Love, who recently told Marc Maron that Del Rey and Kurt Cobain are “the only two true musical geniuses I’ve ever known.”
Consider that as the new album arrives — it’s called “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” — Del Rey’s 2012 major-label debut, “Born to Die,” is in its 475th week on the Billboard 200, one indication of a cultural endurance few envisioned back when that album was inspiring skeptical takes about Del Rey’s artistic authenticity.
And yet the self-canonizing she undertakes on “Ocean Blvd” isn’t merely a flex. Rather, her summoning of Lanas past is a way to frame a work of determined introspection on which she’s taking stock of the social and emotional forces that shaped her ideas about family, marriage, art, motherhood, sex, celebrity and death.
Del Rey isn’t the only A-list pop star engaging in this type of personal history. “Endless Summer Vacation,” by another of her admirers, Miley Cyrus, has a similar my-back-pages energy, while Taylor Swift — who recruited Del Rey for a cameo on last year’s “Midnights” and with whom she shares a key studio collaborator in Jack Antonoff — just launched a blockbuster stadium tour built to showcase a succession of former selves.
But Del Rey’s thinking, and by extension her songwriting, is the deepest and most penetrating.
“A&W,” whose title abbreviates “American Whore” even as it knowingly evokes the nostalgic fast-food chain, takes up Del Rey’s complicated performance of gender with startling candor: “If I told you that I was raped, do you really think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it?”
Line by line, her lyrics deliver a staggering blend of the profound and the vernacular, as in “Candy Necklace,” where she’s “sitting on the sofa, super-suicidal / Hate to say the word, but, baby, hand on the Bible, I do.” Savor the intricate rhythms in those words!
At 77 minutes in length, “Ocean Blvd” risks tiring the listener’s ear, which is why Del Rey and her co-producers — Antonoff along with Drew Erickson, Zach Dawes and Mike Hermosa — keep folding unexpected sounds and textures into the album’s largely piano-based arrangements. “The Grants” has lush gospelchoir background vocals; “Fishtail” has squirmy synths reminiscent of those on Swift’s “Midnights”; “Peppers “and “Taco Truck x VB” have the kind of bleary hip-hop beats that Del Rey mostly stayed away from on the folkier albums that followed “Lust for Life.”
But even at its most strippeddown, as on “Fingertips” and the desperately pretty “Paris, Texas,” Del Rey’s richly expressive singing holds your attention in part because you’re never quite sure where her slowly unwinding melodies will go.