Lana Del Rey’s second album of the year is a sweeping survey of her talent as a songwriter, stripped of the aesthetic borders she often places around her work.
In the decade since her major-label debut Born to Die, Lana Del Rey has worked so quickly and consistently, navigating so many passing controversies and thorny conversations, that it has been easy to take for granted her steady evolution as an artist. The 36-year-old musician recently took a break from social media, allowing herself an uncharacteristically quiet press cycle, and there she sits on the cover of her second album of 2021, Blue Banisters, nestled between two German shepherds, serene and pastoral, removed from the world. Things, for the moment, seem peaceful.
So let’s take this opportunity to check in on the state of her art with a standout track called “Black Bathing Suit.” The subject matter remains in her wheelhouse. She admits to being complicated. She self-identifies as a “bad girl,” someone with a price on her head, living on borrowed time. She writes with a casual sense of fatalism about loneliness (“If this is the end, I want a boyfriend”) and ennui (“When I’m being honest, I’m tired of this shit”), drawing our attention to the titular item of clothing with a sense of focus that, when applied in horror films, generally leads us to believe this object will later be used to identify a body. This is all Lana 101.
But there are crucial updates. Unlike the Great Gatsby roleplay of her early work, all the action takes place in the present day—which we recognize instantly because the opening line goes, “Grenadine, quarantine, I like you a lot/It’s LA, ‘Hey’ on Zoom, Target parking lot.” And while it was once easy to label Lana a pop artist—someone whose songwriting worked with tight structures and hooks, accompanied by fancy videos and dance remixes—“Black Bathing Suit” breaks from any confines. As she moves from verse to pre-chorus to chorus, she lets the seams show, each section finding its own distinct atmosphere with ghostly harmonies, off-time cymbal taps, and, near the end, a hoarse, Fetch the Bolt Cutters wail. Eventually, you start to feel like you’re in the studio alongside her, listening past the fadeout as she tweaks and ornaments the music to keep herself interested.
There is a sense of playfulness, unguardedness, and freedom to Blue Banisters. If its predecessor, Chemtrails Over the Country Club, was Lana’s most traditional singer-songwriter affair—a somewhat monochromatic collection of mid-tempo songs played on piano and acoustic guitar—then these 15 tracks share a more boundless vision. One of its highlights, the closing “Sweet Carolina,” pairs a stunning, delicate vocal performance with a set of lyrics possibly dedicated to her sister. And then, out of nowhere, there’s a verse that goes like this:
You name your babe Lilac Heaven
After your iPhone 11
‘Crypto forever,’ screams your stupid boyfriend
Fuck you, Kevin
It’s funny and real, a reminder that the people we love most aren’t just the ones to whom we dedicate our earnest love songs—they’re often the recipients of our dumbest jokes.
This freewheeling tone also informs the structure of the album. Placed among modern transmissions like “Black Bathing Suit,” “Sweet Carolina,” and “Text Book” (“There we were, screaming, ‘Black Lives Matter,’” she reflects) are songs like “Living Legend” and “Cherry Blossom,” titles that have circulated among her fanbase in unofficial form for years. These recordings, which date back as far as the sessions for 2014’s Ultraviolence, constitute about a third of the tracklist, stretching the runtime past an hour and making the whole thing feel slightly unwieldy, off-balance, lacking the cohesion of her best albums.
And yet, these qualities also make the record stand out: a survey of Lana’s gifts, stripped of the aesthetic borders she often places around her work. It’s an approach that aligns her with the legacy artists she has always drawn from—Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen, craftsmen constantly digging through the archives to recontextualize their mythology. But there is also pop precedent. Were Lana less obsessive about her body of work, she might have sequenced the newer songs onto a deluxe edition of Chemtrails; were she more savvy, she might have issued them as an interlinked companion release to close out the year.
Fortunately, Blue Banisters stands on its own, encompassing the many styles she has by now mastered: The edgy Miles Kane collaboration “Dealer” returns to the psych-rock hypnosis of Ultraviolence, while the spare “Beautiful” draws from the same well of aspirational standards as 2017’s “Love.” Her collaborators include familiar names (Rick Nowels, Zachary Dawes) and literal family members (her father and sister, co-writers on “Sweet Carolina”), alongside ex-boyfriends and producers like Mike Dean. Still, the whole thing flows with a breezy, self-contained hum. For those unfamiliar with the pivots and scenery changes from album to album, you might not even notice the time-jumps.
Despite the wide range of moods—the unbridled howl of “I don’t wanna live” in “Dealer,” her old Hollywood quiver returning for “Nectar of the Gods”—the clearest evolution is in the writing. Sometime around 2019’s high-water mark Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Lana made a shift from character studies and archetypes (best exemplified here in the classic-sounding “Thunder”) to first-person musings on celebrity, inextricable from her own life in the public eye. On Chemtrails, she sang about “coverin’ Joni and dancin’ with Joan,” and now she writes about her family, her creative process, and her personal struggles, most directly in “Text Book.” For all the sadness and desperation across her songbook, an early lyric in the song, “I didn’t even like myself,” feels like her barest, most wounded confession.
When Lana released the piano ballad “Arcadia” this summer, she instructed her fans, “Listen to it like you listened to ‘Video Games.’” On one hand, she might have been trying to game the system, encouraging listeners to boost the streaming numbers to match those of her past work. (Born to Die remains her only album to spawn a Top 10 hit.) But maybe she was asking for something more personal. After all, her debut single was likely the last time that Lana could release music to zero expectations, introducing herself to the world on her own terms. Like a lot of people who feel misunderstood, she is a chronic over-explainer, and Blue Banisters sprawls and elaborates past the point where we can place our own projections onto it. We know too much. But at its best, this music offers an even more rewarding thrill: It manages to entertain, enrapture, and even surprise because of how well we know Lana Del Rey—and how much there is still to learn.
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