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.
