Lana Del Rey Is Back With A New Song, And It Is Great
Produced by Dan Auerbach, who can polish any turd.
It’s been almost two and a half years since Elizabeth Grant uploaded ‘Video Games’ to YouTube under her stage name Lana Del Rey. Two and a half years since that song was “discovered” by Stranger Records and declared the “Next Big Thing”. Two and a half years since she ignited the internet with a fierce and echoing debate: was she real, or the product of a manipulative marketing campaign? Had we all been duped by the marketing masterminds of a major label? Did it matter?
The resulting album Born To Die was Lana Del Rey’s second full-length release and, after a few false-starts (terrible TV appearances and subsequently cancelled tours), she took it on the road. The album made for addictive listening; it divided critics, won a bunch of awards, and reached #1 in eleven countries. Then, after her Paradise EP and her Great Gatsby effort ‘Young And Beautiful’, Del Rey released a peculiar wet fart of a short film called Tropico in December 2013: “I really just wanted us all to be together,” she said at the time, “so I could try and visually close out my chapter before I release the new record.”
Me and Dan Auerbach are excited to present you Ultraviolence pic.twitter.com/aRAZYscwYd
— Lana Del Rey (@LanaDelRey) February 20, 2014
That new record is called Ultraviolence. It was produced by the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach, pictured in the not-uncreepy photo above, and if its first single ‘West Coast’ is anything to go by, he’s toned down the sheen of over-production that clouded her past few releases, and it’s going to be great.
It says something about Lana Del Rey’s past few film clips that I watched about 45 seconds of that before realising it was on loop.