Lana Del Rey — Home — What’s Cool?

2019 has been an absolute powerhouse of a year for music, and that continues with Lana Del Rey’s most recent offering Norman Fucking Rockwell!. While I wasn’t able to connect to her two previous projects, Ultraviolence and Lust For Life as objectively impressive as they were, things are completely different here with NFR!. This indie project is revealing, relentless, and beautifully organized. This might be the biggest surprise for me this year.

This project’s runtime is a long one at over an hour, but there are hardly any lulls throughout this entirely enticing project. A sometimes emotionally distant and mysterious Lana is telling a story here of pure and unadulterated personal strife, self-discovery, and dealing with the complexity that is love. Each track is unique enough to stand out on its own, but there is a general cohesiveness achieved here in which each song flows intentionally into the next. Del Rey sings beautifully about freedom, self-imprisonment, and comments subtly on the musical and political climate she finds herself in 2019.

Some of my favorite musicians are able to achieve a sense of levity and comic relief paired with a staggering sense of tension and importance on their projects. That is why, for instance, Father John Misty’s Pure Comedy is a perfect 10/10 project for me. Del Rey achieves a similar balance of self-awareness and wit accompanied by an urgency and importance; this music has to be heard now.

This project glamorously packages an empathetic and heartfelt message of sorrow and sympathy to the world around its messenger. What Del Rey does here that impresses me most, just as Misty did on Pure Comedy, is to paint what could be considered a pessimistic picture of the world around her, and then say despite what she’s facing, she has hope.

This is a fantastic project that completely caught me off guard. While it isn’t necessarily perfect, and its runtime could be considered slightly long for some, this project is a bold and beautiful statement that cements Lana Del Rey as one of the best American songwriters practicing their craft. Must listen.

Favorite Tracks: “Mariners Apartment Complex”, “Venice Bitch”, “Cinnamon Girl”, “Happiness is a butterfly”, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it”

SCORE: 8/10