The album’s title – Chemtrails Over the Country Club – could have been used on many of Del Rey’s previous records, pointing up as it does the contrast between the Americana of white picket fences and the nation’s uneasy dark side, a continued fascination of Lana Del Rey’s work. All these nods are seeded carefully through a suite of songs that also reference one another. The dead-eyed jadedness of her earlier protagonists has been replaced by something less coy and more directįame is just one concern: Del Rey weighs up the relative merits of change and constancy, of love and loneliness, all with intensely discreet instrumentation provided by returnee producer Jack Antonoff, who worked on Del Rey’s last album, the equally extraordinary Norman Fucking Rockwell!. On Wild at Heart, she claims not to be a star, nodding obliquely to the death of Princess Diana – “the cameras had flashes, they caused the car crashes” – an impression only reinforced by repeated references to Elton John’s Candle in the Wind. “We did it for fun, we did it for free,” she sings of her work, in one of Del Rey’s best vocals to date. A minor-key folk song that doesn’t bother trying to be anything but, Yosemite dates back to sessions for Del Rey’s 2017 album, Lust for Life, but embodies this album’s concern with craft. In the middle is perhaps this great album’s greatest segment. She accosts you in various bars, not only telling you her star sign – Cancer – but her moon: Leo. Throughout this excellent seventh outing, Del Rey frequently chews over the vexed business of success, her loneliness and her comradeship. On White Dress she is alone by the end, she is joined by Weyes Blood and singer-songwriter Zella Day, each singing a Joni verse and joining in on period-perfect harmonies, weighing up the contradictions. Del Rey’s album has more than one arc, but one is a numbers game. “Down at the Men in Music Business Conference,” she confides in a breathless rush, the budding artist finally feels “seen”.Īt the album’s other end sits a cover of Joni Mitchell’s For Free, in which the grande dame of song pondered, in 1970, how a busker can play “real good, for free” to so little acclaim, while Mitchell herself is raking it in as a celebrity. Sung in a fluttering soprano at the very limit of her range, White Dress pictures the 19-year-old Del Rey in a tight uniform, working as a waitress in the mid-00s and dreaming of what is to come.
Lana Del Rey’s latest album begins with the borderline infamous singer-songwriter reminiscing about a time before fame.