In among the insults hurled at US pop starlet Lana Del Rey (you know: fake, manufactured, rich, Botoxed), there is one gripe that survives a nanosecond's scrutiny. Even in the more measured enclaves of comment land, there lurks a feeling that Del Rey (born Elizabeth Grant) seems a little waxen, a little dead behind the eyes. You can see what they mean in her uneven performance on Saturday Night Live recently, or the bizarre video for "Born to Die", the title track from Del Rey's eagerly awaited, sort-of debut album (Lizzy Grant did make one earlier).
Predictably, Del Rey's detractors cluster around the "dead behind the eyes" zinger as proof that she is a pneumatic marionette programmed to mouth commercial noir-pop songs by an evil industry cabal hellbent on outwitting a noble and sincere public. Because we routinely send all those authentic hits by ugly women playing diddley-bows to the top of the charts, right?
Isn't there, though, a chance that Grant might be playing dead? Her album takes the "gangsta Nancy Sinatra" persona introduced last summer on "Video Games" and runs with it, often from the cops. If she is acting a little blank, it's because that is just what a self-medicating 21st-century Stepford moll with an existential hangover would be doing. The Lana of Born to Die is waxy, anaesthetised, in love with bad boys, seizing that day, bottle in hand. Unlike other hedonic outpourings, such as, say, Lady Gaga's "Just Dance" or Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night", Lana Del Rey's partying is fuelled by a knowing sadness, and sung in that laconic, hypnotic voice, which ultimately saves this thoroughly dissolute, feminist nightmare of a record for the romantics among us.
If Del Rey is wild at heart, she is just weird enough on top to remain compelling. What is David Sneddon – winner of Fame Academy passim – doing with a writing credit on "National Anthem"? The sound here is periodically fascinating, a string-laden shiver of 50s chanson beefed up by hip-hop production values, courtesy of Emile Haynie. Of the songs not previously released, "Off to the Races" turns Del Rey from vintage siren to R&B hoochie most convincingly. There's jazz in Del Rey's dextrous vocal, and new territory in the swoop and pow of Haynie's undertow.
Half the songs here make reference to death; eight are love songs to bad men; the rest are drug- and drink-fuelled vignettes in which the Hamptons and Rikers Island overlap in a slummy Venn diagram. There are red dresses, bikinis, makeup and (this being a wannabe hip-hop record) brands, from the luxe (Bugatti Cheyron) to the proletarian (Pabst Blue Ribbon). Songs such as "Dark Paradise" and "Summertime Sadness" rework the themes of helpless devotion and sybaritic emptiness, to diminishing returns, using trip-hop. But then there's a lyric (telephone wires "sizzling like a snare"), or a guitar arpeggio to keep you from puncturing a wrist vein with a cocktail umbrella.
"This is What Makes Us Girls", meanwhile, ends it all with an apparently semi-autobiographical tale of teen girls cutting school, drinking and table-dancing. And, after all these anthems for doomed female youth, a little mystery still remains. Is Lana Del Rey a moral creature, pointing out the dangers of losing oneself? Or is the former Lizzy Grant just using the inevitability of death as an excuse for accepting the easy fate of being some bad'un's arm-candy?
• This article was corrected on 30 January 2012. We amended the photo caption with the correct name of the photographer.
