When Lana Del Rey first introduced herself as the "Gangster Nancy Sinatra" on 2011's career-making 'Video Games', she posed a ribald question:
'I heard that you like the bad girls, honey / Is that true?'
The resounding answer was yes.
Audiences swooned over the Queen of Summertime Sadness and her dark, intoxicating take on good ol' White American nostalgia that quietly revolutionised pop music over the course of a decade. Hit songs could be sweeping rather than just sugary, sorrow could be as seductive as sexiness.
Del Rey's transition from glamorous pop idol to generation-defining songwriter was cemented with 2019 high point Norman Fucking Rockwell! and she continues to capitalise on her cultural cache with Did You Know That There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, her fourth album in as many years.
Now, nine records and 12 years on from her debut, Lana Del Rey is asking far more complicated questions. And from the title on down, Did You Know That There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd is full of them.
'What you doin' with your life? Do you think about it?'
'When's it going to be my turn?'
'Did you know a singer can still be looking like a sidepiece at 33?'
'Will the baby be alright? Will I have one of mine?' Can I handle it even if I do?
Those Big Life questions signal how Del Rey is shifting from her fixation with American fable-making to a preoccupation with her own legacy, security, and family.
On the Gospel-leaning opener 'The Grants' she sings of her 'grandmother's last smile' as well as the first of multiple name checks to her sister and her newborn baby.
On the raw 'Fingertips', she pleads her brother to quit smoking and shades her mother. Then there's the song 'Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he's deep-sea fishing'.
This newfound lyrical intimacy is matched by Del Rey experimenting with new sounds.
She alternates between labyrinthine ballads – 'Kintsugi' and 'Fingertips' are all dreamy pianos and ghostly vocals eschewing conventional verse-chorus structures – and distorting those same swooning songs with trap beats and buzzy bottom end, as on 'Fishtail'.
Those two halves merge triumphantly on 'A&W' a stunningly dense centrepiece that instantly ranks among LDR's finest moments, morphing from misogyny-skewering folk song into a brooding, bass-driven chant.
Another achievement is 'Peppers', which successfully fuses a sample of Canadian rapper Tommy Genesis with hallucinogenic verses and a playful surf-rock bridge. Meanwhile, closing cut 'Taco Truck x VB' is – spoiler alert – essentially a gritty reimagining of her 2019 track 'Venice Bitch' with woozy beats.
However, these late-album highlights do come after a long stretch of similarly sounding, slower-paced numbers that really make you feel the album's 77-minute run time.
There are two fairly indulgent interludes – one featuring Grammy-winning RnB artist and bandleader Jon Batiste, and another dedicated to a four-minute sermon from celebrity pastor Judah Smith. A bold inclusion but a skippable one.
Far better is the romantic duet with Father John Misty on 'Let The Light In' and 'Paris, Texas' featuring SYML, a piano waltz where the keys dance alongside Del Rey's melody.
But even at the album's sleepiest, there's always some signature Lana Del Rey-ism to grab your ear, such as the chorus of the title track: 'Fuck me to death, love me until I love myself'. Or the charmingly snarky moment amid the syrupy, symphonic 'Sweet' where she sings, 'If you want some basic bitch go to the Beverly Center'.
…Ocean Blvd is an album rooted in the past while also looking to the future.
There's material that treads familiar territory (especially to her pair of 2021 albums Blue Banisters and Chemtrails Over The Country Club) but also LDR at her very best, in music that's as progressive and accomplished as anything she's ever done.
It's a knotty listen that's ultimately well worth the time to untangle. Another impressive entry in an increasingly important body of work from an artist that continues to carve their own unique space in the contemporary American Songbook.