Description
Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, her ninth album, fits Del Rey’s curious career arc: it is her quietest, most wilfully inscrutable record in a long time, perhaps since 2015’s glacially paced, rebelliously quiet Honeymoon.
Many of the songs here don’t have choruses or hooks, and instead feel like the result of Del Rey simply standing in front of a microphone and vibing out. As on 2021’s Blue Banisters, her usual US iconography has been largely replaced with specifics from her own life – the names of her siblings recur; one song is named for Margaret Qualley, the actor girlfriend of Del Rey’s producer, Jack Antonoff; five songs were written with Mike Hermosa, an ex-boyfriend.
Del Rey’s artistic universe has long been a closed feedback loop, and in Ocean Blvd’s most dramatic, dynamic moments – the jaw-dropping A&W and hazy closer Taco Truck x VB – she outright samples herself, reusing elements of two NFR! songs to create a psychedelic, unexpected time warp.
As she steps into new lyrical territory here, so too does Lana enter new sonic worlds. Her album merges the soulful, classic, timeless sounds of a singer-songwriter from a distant time and the vocal melodies and techniques of an old Hollywood starlet
