That impulse towards a communal understanding of her universe appears most obviously in songs like “God Bless America - And All the Beautiful Women in It” and “When the World Was At War We Kept Dancing,” two pared-down folk ballads with souped-up low ends (the former includes instrumentation by Metro Boomin, with errant gunfire punctuating the chorus). The effect is that of a slow pan, the frame creeping outward from Del Rey and stretching gently towards the horizon. “Look at you kids, you know you’re the coolest,” she sings reassuringly, relinquishing her role as the protagonist. Perhaps the most significant departure here is evident from Lust for Life’s first song, “ Love”-a warm, grainy, ’50s-rock anthem (and by far the album’s best single) in which Del Rey shifts focus from her own internal struggle to address her audience directly. “I’d rather have static.” Beyond a symbolic “Pardon Our Dust” sign for a nation in turmoil, it’s an apt representation of the moment Lust for Life captures-a record of transition, documenting not so much the result of a profound change in worldview as the process of change itself. “I’m not going to have the American flag waving while I’m singing ’Born to Die,’” she said recently, of her current tour visuals. As it turns out, Lust for Life isn’t outright happy or overtly political (and thank god for that), though Del Rey is re-examining her relationship with Americana. This would be Del Rey’s “happy album,” fans predicted-or worse, an obligatory pivot into wokeness. Even stranger: the tracklist is packed with features for the first time since we’ve known her. First, that smile, beaming from the belladonna of sadness, posed in front of the same truck from the Born to Die artwork. Two things immediately set Lust for Life apart from the rest of Del Rey’s catalog. Lust for Life presents her as something more interesting: a great American storyteller. For years, it seemed Del Rey’s artistry lay in her ability to offer herself as a concept pursued to its logical end. But her fourth full-length, Lust for Life, suggests that at its best and truest, Del Rey’s music is sublimely simple: one voice, one story, one meaning. Her layers on layers of symbolism can be disorienting, as I imagine Del Rey intends them to be, encouraging endless cross-references and deep-dive readings of her work that seek to apply some grand cinematic theory to it all-and perhaps there is. Her songs overflow with the iconography of America at its most mythic: purple mountains’ majesty, rockets’ red gleaming, Monroe, Manson. Still, even for the converted, it’s almost too easy to trip into the endless black holes of Del Rey’s universe, where Hollywood sits at the very center in glamorous ruin. Every word, every sigh, every violin swell, the Whitman quotes and JFK fantasies and soft ice cream. If there’s anything about Del Rey that’s obvious by now, it’s that she means it-all of it. Instead, doubling down on her palette of inky blues and blacks, the singer-songwriter has delivered a trio of dark, dense, radio-agnostic albums that stand wholly apart from any of her pop music peers. Since the drastically superior Paradise Edition reissue of Born to Die, Del Rey has neither swayed nor settled.
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