Intoxicating love, triumphant self-destruction, abject abandonment, simmering-to-roiling melancholia: this is the tonal palette Lana Del Rey has spent the past 12 years fashioning into a heady sonic calling card. Pop is still thrilled by reinvention, but for the musician born Elizabeth Grant consistency is crucial: her inner darkness is always rendered in languid, sumptuously beautiful ballads littered with strange, specific detail and steeped in the musty beauty of golden age Hollywood, as well as the gritty romance of everyday Americana. Songs are occasionally jolted into the 21st century by sharply flickering trap beats and always by her voice, a puffy sonic pout with a slight slur – in the past she has christened the cumulative style “narco swing.”
On her lovely and perturbing ninth album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, Del Rey continues to map out this turbulent, symbol-strewn emotional landscape with disturbing ferocity: if the wretched creature here doesn’t line up with your mental image of a superstar singer-songwriter, you haven’t been consuming enough celebrity misery memoirs. On the hauntingly gorgeous title track – which takes pains to pinpoint her favourite moment of Harry Nilsson’s 1974 single Don’t Forget Me – she identifies hard with the eponymous tunnel, which has been boarded up for decades. Del Rey is tired of being closed off and terrified of being forgotten: she needs to be walked through. “Open me up, tell me you like it / Fuck me to death, love me until I love myself,” she croons elegiacally.
That craving for ego-obliterating affection is her lodestar; a pop trope she gave a cleverly contemporary spin on her 2011 breakthrough single Video Games. That song was a celebration of all-consuming romance, however wilfully delusional – yet on this album’s staggering standout track A&W she has been robbed even of that. “It’s not about having someone to love me any more / This is the experience of being an American whore,” she mutters over scratchy acoustic guitar and warbling keys. Gradually, synths drone louder, a hypnotic trap beat appears, and things get blurry, feedback-drenched and faintly industrial. We hear about Jimmy, who only loves her “when he wanna get high”, while Del Rey herself multiplies into a drugged-up choir destined for “the club”. It feels like a desperate cry from a pained soul, but also something more abstract and conceptual; a twisted anthem for an opioid-ravaged America, even.
Ocean Blvd does not begin with one of these poetic studies in disturbing dysfunctionality: gospel choir-backed opener The Grants is uncharacteristically wholesome, if characteristically morbid, as Del Rey counts the treasured memories – her niece, her grandmother’s final smile – that her pastor says are the only things she can transport into the afterlife. A few tracks later, she murmurs and chuckles along with an extensive recording of the controversial megachurch preacher Judah Smith, who has expressed anti-abortion and homophobic views. Critics were confused – was this an endorsement, or a satirical takedown?
On Ocean Blvd, Del Rey’s inbuilt ambiguity seeps deep into the music too. Instead of the smattering of pop songs – strangely unsettling, always, but catchy as well – that made her name in the 2010s, she now deals almost exclusively in impressionistic material which doesn’t instantly hit the pleasure centre. These tracks reward repeated listening, such as Candy Necklace – a Jon Batiste collaboration dense with Del Rey tropes (idealistic love, obsessive love, soul-sucking love) that is meandering at first, later potent and indelible. It pays dividends to invest in her world, an articulation of American darkness, of female pain, of the quest for temporary transcendence. Del Rey’s music has always been partly about cheap, empty thrills, but this richly imagistic, captivatingly cryptic album is never one itself.
