The most rewarding enjoy of being a careerlong Lana Del Rey fan is that of looking at the scaffolding upholding the yank pop archetypes, the identical she has lovingly inhabited, slowly falling apart. In the very beginning, it changed into, for plenty, all too much — the summertime disappointment and Pepsi Cola-flavored p****, daddy troubles collected like buying and selling playing cards. But with each release, the yank flag flapping at the rims of her discography has inched nearer and closer to everlasting 1/2-mast. Gradually, she’s shed her gangsta Nancy Sinatra beginnings for an increasingly messier track that merges her infatuation for a cool animated film (and underappreciated humor, as “down on the guys in tune business conference” proved, among others) with bleak, apocalypse-streaked storytelling and real-global intimacy.
“A&W,” the second single from her approaching album Did you already know That there’s a Tunnel below Ocean Blvd., is Lana further, gloriously unspooled. At seven mins, it begins like a spontaneous, piano-driven wordy stream not in contrast to a maximum of the tracks on her ultimate, Blue Banisters — vocals a step above a voice memo, background noise mingling apart the contraptions. “I am a princess, I am divisive / ask me why i’m like this / maybe I’m just kinda like this,” she sings, a self-proclaimed “American whore” right here, on music that feels like Lana attempted to write down a hole tune.
After which four mins in, manufacturer and co-writer Jack Antonoff serves up certainly one of his specials: The track switches to tinny synth-pop and Lana serves up a Uffie-fashion grade-faculty rap (“Your mother called, I advised her, you are f up massive time,” she sings) that might have been at domestic on Born to Die. That is Lana on foot the tightrope between her plasticky pop roots and her current folk’s minimalism — susceptible, but not sufficient to give up on a great time.
