After two-and-a-half-studio albums of beauty queen perdition and nihilist luxe – 2014’s Ultraviolence, 2012’s debut Born to Die and its half-sibling, The Paradise Edition – you wouldn’t have thought there would be any road left for Lana Del Rey to coast down, her long hair casually whipping the cheek of some stony-faced sugar daddy. So adept has Del Rey been at exploring the internal worlds of numbed female characters posing as arm candy, it seemed that her master narrative – beautiful women, bad scenes – could only ever be wrung dry. Not so.
On songs like The Blackest Day, Del Rey’s protagonist is still “looking for love in all the wrong places”. She is complicit in her own objectification – “I like you a lot,” runs the brilliant, gimlet-eyed Music to Watch Boys to, “So I do what you want” – but just as often, a hopeless romantic. Now, though, she’s also listening to Billie Holiday, Lay Lady Lay, and quoting David Bowie (on The Blackest Day, Religion and Terrence Loves You respectively). No matter how architect-designed the beach house, paradise remains riddled with serpents. On the Bond-theme manqué that is 24, there are “only 24 hours in a day/And half as many ways for you to lie to me, my little love”.
It is, perhaps, a little hard to spot the hits that will take on, say, Taylor Swift, but Honeymoon is arguably the most Lana Del Rey album Del Rey has yet produced. For the first time, Elizabeth Grant (Del Rey), veteran co-writer and co-producer Rick Nowels and recently promoted co-conspirator Kieron Menzies have created a comprehensively retro iteration of the Del Rey myth, delicately informed by jazz as much as R&B and hip-hop.
Honeymoon is really one long crystalline glide that lasts for 12 songs, one baffling snippet of a TS Eliot poem and one Nina Simone cover, carried along by music so cinematic and unobtrusive that sometimes it’s barely there. Del Rey’s voice is the star, swooping, warbling, contemplating “murder and carnage”. The beats, such as they are, seem to be happening in the next rented property along the seafront. One of Del Rey’s signature moves has been to ally torch songs to up-to-date sounds. Where her skeletal trap beats exist – on Art Deco, or Del Rey’s latest celebration of California, Freak – they are mere ghosts of skeletons, marbles dropped down a glass staircase across the valley.
There are two ways of taking Del Rey. Critics justly object that she celebrates the same played-out Stepford moll glamour that American culture has always pinned up. A more nuanced take is that Del Rey’s embodiment of all these haute trash stylings is as much a conscious art project as anything Lady Gaga might once have cooked up. Or as her Simone cover has it: “Please don’t let me be misunderstood.” This time, perhaps, she won’t be.
