album review: 'did you know that there's a tunnel under ocean blvd' by lana del rey

…well, seventh time’s the charm, right?

Truth be told, I did not expect to have enough material for another Lana Del Rey review - I’ve said my piece time and time again, and by the time I reviewed Chemtrails Over The Country Club, I felt like I had reached something of a conclusive point in my contentious relationship with Lana Del Rey’s albums. Granted, I also said that when I reviewed Blue Banisters and was proven wrong, but it turns out there’s been more activity over the past year and change that I felt like a full-length review was worth my time - and hell, there’s enough of you that keep showing up for it, why not keep sauntering into that abyss?

And really, there are three things worth discussing, and the first is the aftermath of Blue Banisters… which was divisive to say the least. The album was messy, uneven, with a lot of awkward half measures that didn’t really work but also with enough moments that I was convinced it would have a cult fandom in and of itself - discovering that Lana Del Rey purposely did not promote it well because she was intending it as a defensive, explanatory project for all of her controversy that on some level she didn’t want anyone to hear made even more sense. Of course, what most folks probably remember it for most are the memes with ‘Dealer’, which even as someone who doesn’t like the album kind of sucks - there was more going on that’s worth analysis?

You know what also sucks? Watching a whole swathe of her fandom turn on her because she appeared to have put some weight in some unflattering paparazzi photos, and then moralizing your complaints with a lot of bastardized logic that you would never have brought out if it wasn’t for a shift in aesthetic and the (slight) ‘falloff’ in 2021. As someone who has made a lot of harsh critique of Lana Del Rey for damn near a decade now, it was so obviously transparent and ugly, and not only showed that you knew and excused all of her other bullshit for years because she was serving the looks and music, but that your surface-level moral convictions only go as far as your consumption, so fuck off. Now this would be the time for the most cynical record executives to throw her under the bus - especially with up-and-coming acts like Ethel Cain taking swathes of her audience by storm with her 2022 breakout Preacher’s Daughter - but I think it’s revealing here that she wasn’t blackballed by the industry; folks still wanted to work with her, which is why she finally showed up on Taylor Swift’s Midnights and was able to recruit her most ever collaborators to date for this album, which many have described as her most difficult and impenetrable to date. Well, I’m damn near a veteran with Lana Del Rey’s music at this point, and I was indeed curious, so what did we get with Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd?

…well, let me put it like this: this is the sort of album that feels like a natural continuation from Blue Banisters - it’s messy and ramshackle, there’s more swerves that don’t work even if there’s none that feel naturally memetic, and like every Lana Del Rey album it sprawls into sleepy, undercooked implications that even if you’ve bought into her narrative will not have the same magnetism as her strongest songs, especially as she’s serving even less of the glamourous fantasy she built in the 2010s. If anything it has the feel of a story where if you’re not already deep into the weeds it’ll lose you, full of so many loose ends of sound and theme from records past that finally seem to be weaving together but that won’t have resonance if you missed them along the way. And I’ll be damned as someone who has followed along… it almost works, I think it’s her best album to date.

Now that’s a pretty heavy statement coming from me given the history, so let’s add a bunch of qualifiers: most of which fall in the category that if you don’t like Lana Del Rey already, this album is not a jump on point nor will change your mind. The album runs for 77 minutes, is very piano-ballad heavy, and probably could have been trimmed down and refined, which increasingly feels like less of a priority - she’s more interested in presenting her messy reality so if words spill off rhythm or the songs spiral without structure or her album opens with backing singers warming up or if studio chatter spills into the mix or the interludes run way too long, that’s part of the point - capricious glamour and perfection without looking like you’re trying are considerably less important now. Now all of this approach was laid down on Blue Banisters, but you can tell the swerve to go back and work with more competent producers like Jack Antonoff where his sweeping gentle pulses, slightly ragged strings, and gentle keys are a major plus, to say nothing of ironing out the mixing and mastering issues that were so frustrating on that album. It’s also a factor to her delivery staying in her clearer lower-to-midrange, where even if she slips into her higher register she’s got more control and balance - yes, she’ll occasionally try to cram a few too many words into the meter and the rhythm can feel a bit askew, but it feels more purposeful this time, less awkward. That doesn’t excuse every dalliance with trap percussion, that feels as stiff and sterile and awkward as ever, but there’s something about their inclusion that feels very ‘agenda-driven’, just enough of a signpost to the fans who want what passes for ‘bangers’ from Lana Del Rey so she can focus on what matters more deeply to her.

And more than ever, that is family, both her immediate relatives and whatever could pass for the family that she wants going forward… and both of which she also feels slipping through her fingers. Now again, the thematic seeds of this were planted on Blue Banisters, but that was an album that felt deliberately deconstructive of her predetermined ideas and framing, but with a series of half measures that prevented her from fully sticking the landing; it’s why the writing felt more stripped down and free verse, the compositions feeling more scattered. Here, despite the lethargic tempos and a few too many swerves, there does seem to be a sharper focus - Lana Del Rey is reckoning with her tangible but precarious legacy and what she sacrificed to build it. She’s always been conscious of the passage of time - that lingering decay has been lurking the backdrop since at least Lust for Life - but where she could more easily brush it aside or glamourize riding the tide, there’s none of that in the loss of family where tour kept her from going to the funerals, and this is where you can tell she’s starting to peel back the layers and get into the baggage beneath it, especially alongside her persistent failure to find a partner or have the children she desperately wants. The greatest adversary now is time itself, but there’s a difference between asking whether she’ll be loved when she’s no longer young and beautiful… and then potentially being at that place and living through that cruelty. This also builds off of Norman Fucking Rockwell and Blue Banisters in turn - she’s seen and been with so many men who fall into pathetic places and can’t live up to her, where she fits less and less into that conservative nuclear family unit that prizes youthful femininity, where she’d be comfortable settling… but when family members die and you grow older without that partnership, the privileged foundation cracks even deeper, and she’s conscious that the old magic is slipping.

And that creates tangible stakes to the drama, and for as much as Lana Del Rey is a deeply flawed and frustrating songwriter, it enables me to actually care about her narrative a lot more. The title track is a great example of the persistent fear of being forgotten, and even if parts of the song feel like coy sexual references, that’s deeply interwoven into her art and we see more glimpses of real vulnerability. And that fear echoes onto the very hushed, whispery ‘Kintsugi’ where more of her legacy spills forth alongside a family funeral and the kids who remember old folk songs - and a wonder if any of her music will ever last that long, although the second verse seems to draw reference to sexual violence and how that became intermingled with her artistic narrative. I referenced that back when I reviewed Ultraviolence and questioned a lot of the framing, and this was a failure in my original review, where I didn’t realize her attempt to claim some glamour in the moment was a mechanism to process trauma and hold a vestige of power. Here it’s more obvious, especially on the Father John Misty collaboration ‘Let The Light In’ which… look, what happened years ago between them feels more in plain sight than ever even they’ll never admit it outright, it’s another striking chapter to her legacy…. even as she’s conscious that she’s only playing the sidepiece, which has a lot less glamour when you’re in your mid-to-late 30s.

And she’s reckoning with the steep, darker cost of that legacy painted around her, specifically on ‘A&W’ with deliberate callbacks to Ultraviolence beyond the rattling guitars for its first half, probably one of the hardest songs to digest on the album where she looks back at the audience as a women who experienced sexual violence and wonders just how many think she deserved it, made all the more difficult by the second half of the song where she finds herself sliding into that haze of debauchery again as the percussion gets heavier and glitchier with the one hip-hop beat that works against the strings sample, test just how far you’ll extend your hand. It creates a messy tension, because I’ve never believed this is some intentional ironic deflection - which apparently puts me at odds with so many critics who believed that, even though Lana herself has said, even on this album, that it’s not ironic - but simply that bad framing and writing created implications that have persisted in the culture and there is a privilege in the act of creating art around it to be sold. That’s not an excuse for what was done to her by men in its wake and a fickle media and fandom feeding into it - back in 2020 when she pushed back against claims she ‘glamorized’ abuse by saying that she was just a very glamourous person, the internet mocked her but I think in retrospect they missed the point - glamour was what was holding Lana Del Rey together, and now that it’s slipping, a much harsher reality is coming to bear, especially as a woman who refuses to play the victim, because her self-reliant image-conscious conservatism shows how she understands her power in her space.

And once you have that context in place, all of the writing begins to make more sense. I’ve seen some folks call ‘Sweet’ a TikTok tradwife song as she tries to bring a man into her world, but these are all questions she’s posing, there’s no guaranteed security that pissed me off so much on Honeymoon. Then there’s ‘Candy Necklace’, where on the second verse she’s spiraling and looking for support, where ‘Rockafella, my umbrella’ might as well serve as a plea for privilege but it doesn’t provide any respite for her loneliness even as there’s a trace of drugged-out enchantment. ‘Fingertips’ is basically an extended free verse moment of pain over faint keys and aching strings where she rips open old family wounds - her mother sent her away as a teenager to get sober, and she’s been away trying to succeed on her own as family members pass and all of the lost connections sting even harder, which leads into the lonely journeys of ‘Paris, Texas’ with its gorgeous, fluttery pianos, and to ‘Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing’, which is all about the fear of losing more and highlighting how it’s more family that shaped her than industry plant accusations. Unfortunately it has the worst lyrics on the album where after calling herself ‘folk, jazz, blue & green’, she has the line ‘regrettably also a white woman / but I have good intentions even if I’m one of the last ones’ - Lana has never been good writing about privilege, this is another excruciating example. On the flip side, one of the best moments on the album is ‘Margaret’, a collaboration with Jack Antonoff and his band Bleachers as she writes about his love story with his fiancé, and there’s a honest yearning and deeply felt happiness in seeing them find something she so desperately wants in the echoes to ‘Paris, Texas’… but not to the point where she takes away from his story, and between that and the lush arrangement and the other moment where the playful stage chatter feels earned and sincere, that really makes it work as one of her best ever songs….

And man, I wish she stuck the landing, because I don’t think the last three songs on the album work at all and it’s the big compromising factor that prevents me from really getting behind this, because there are those poignant, deeply felt emotional moments that show deep-seated struggles at the foundation of her worldview… and just like on the last few albums, the desperate swerve back to something that feels more “familiar” and artificial because otherwise getting too real undercuts huge swathes of her catalog! ‘Fishtail’ is probably the most tolerable even despite the weirdly cheap-sounding trap percussion and autotune in highlighting the guy who bought into her stories and wanted her ‘sadder’ instead of listening to what she wants to say, play an image but not reality… but then on ‘Peppers’ there’s a lot of that image with the Tommy Genesis sample and trap percussion with a casual disregard as she makes out with a partner after a positive COVID test, and ‘Taco Truck x VB’ features a bassy trap reprise of ‘Venice Bitch’ with a lot of really awkward attempts at Latin elements preceding it, and it shows the full extent of who she is, but she’s self-aware enough to know you’ll hate her anyway for going back to it - spin it until you whip it into white cream. And truthfully… I don’t hate her, because she did it once already on ‘A&W’ and more importantly for as much as she knows how to bait a response, she’s too complicated for a blunt instrument, because this is the messy side of her that’s probably just as true? It’s also why I’m not as aggrieved by the ‘Judah Smith Interlude’, which is a sample of a rather infamous megachurch pastor with a fair share of contentious statements where his sermon here is more about himself than service, and while you can hear Lana snicker over the sample because she suspects this guy is plenty full of shit - the song is literally surrounded by ‘A&W’ and ‘Candy Necklaces’, the subtext bleeds across - she’ll also play it too long and go to this megachurch, because she’s still drawn to it; folks are complicated like that. It’s probably the one instance on this album where the extra takes and chatter kind of fits thematically - when you’re revealing things this personal to leave so much studio chatter and metatext on the table you risk compromising the emotional verisimilitude of the album - but, hey you’re still within a system where you have to do what works - wake up, you gotta make money. It just kind of sucks because having created tangible stakes that brought me in, she’s so quick to shove everyone out… although that feels very believable too.

The interesting thing with this album is that for as much as I’ve praised elements of the writing - probably the most I ever have for her - there will be fans that will say that this has been there the entire time and it’s only now that I ‘finally get it’, that subtext has moved into text. I’d disagree - I actually went back to those old albums I don’t like and that hasn’t changed - but I think after having my ‘breakthrough’ when it came to contextualizing Lana Del Rey’s work has made this album an easier sit, and I’m comfortable calling it her best, certainly her most honest and vulnerable in both lyrics and framing. I can also acknowledge when somebody I don’t really like is being treated like shit for bad reasons, and like with Blue Banisters it leaves me a bit unsure as to how well this will be received. It’s hard to recommend - again, I think it works best with the weight of context built over years, it’s not a jump-on point - and even then there’s a degree of self-conscious indulgence that makes it hard to praise for its best moments. But I’m not going to deny that there are some of her best moments in terms of composition and writing, and while it’s way less in your face and demands more investment, I think it’s worth it. I wouldn’t call myself of a fan… I think there’s just an understanding. Congrats on the engagement, Lana Del Rey, I hope you find what you’re looking for - if you know, you know.