Out of the Black: Lana del Rey, ‘Lust For Life’, and The Dawn of a Rethinking

WRITTEN BY: Owen Merskey

“Look at you kids, with your vintage music” opens up Lust for Life, Lana del Rey’s fourth, and possibly most fascinating album. It’s a sweltering 72 minutes, being her longest-running effort until 2023’s Did You Know There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd., and no other album of hers feels like such a potpourri of genre. Rap features intermingle with torch songs, and her writing, though still very much indebted to the clichés of Americana she made millions upon, begins to take a contemporary turn. For the first time, instead of feeling out of time, Lana meets the moment. In lieu of solo efforts and behind-the-scenes collaborations with indie wunderkinds and little-known names, she’s working with big-name chart-toppers, pop stars, rap stars, descendants of legends, and, hell, legends themselves. The year is 2017. Vinyls are back on the racks of Urban Outfitters everywhere. VSCO has usurped Tumblr as the aesthetic gallery du jour. Trump has taken office for the first time, and dread fills the liberal air. What colour is your Fjällräven Kånken backpack? Lana’s utopic vision of an America that seemingly once was no longer comes across as shtick. Out of the black, and into the blue, as they say.

Lana has always been a lightning rod for polarization; perhaps no album of hers has been received as divisively as Lust for Life. Its detractors find it her most superficial album, where Lana postures for her fans and commercial appeal in place of herself. They find her songwriting at its most cliché, the flow choppy, overly long, and muddled regarding artistic intent and direction. In the case of the latter two, I understand the arguments for those two…but crucially, it may be the album’s point. Up to this point in her career, the work of Lana Del Rey has consistently belonged to a separate timeline of trends, compared to what is present on the charts. Perhaps it explains the cult popularity she began to amass after the release of 2011’s “Video Games”; her music is replete with orchestral flourishes, bluesy fatalism, and slow-burning structures that eschew the fast-paced pop music that was inescapable upon her arrival. And Lana doesn’t exactly forgo any of that with this work. This time around, she’s asking something different. She’s asking us to place her in the present day.

That explains the album’s sprawl and the many bold choices Lana makes along the way. For the first time since 2012’s Born to Die, Lana sees herself flirting with rap. And while she continues to dip her toes into the ‘gangsta Nancy Sinatra’ caricature she invented for herself at her career’s outset, time has lent it new life. She reunites with some of her début’s key collaborators, such as Rick Nowels and Emile Haynie, to further a feeling of familiarity. Instead of riding these flows solo, she invests in her cult stardom that had truly snowballed throughout the 2010s to call out some of the hottest names in rap and R&B, like The Weeknd and A$AP Rocky, who both like her, also gained notoriety through the power of Tumblr, catching internet attention for the sleek veneer of their sonics and the effervescent cool of their aesthetics. On the flip side, we even get appearances from people of rock myth in Sean Ono Lennon and Stevie Nicks. But her penchant for trap, this time around, at least, feels more fully immersed in her world than ever. I love the way how Metro Boomin allows sounds of gunshots to come roiling through the chorus of the blissful ‘God Bless America — And All The Beautiful Women In It’, hitting like firecrackers on a hot summer night. Her choice of producers evidently also comes across as inspired and thought-over unlike some of her earlier songs, what with Boi-1da producing the hedonistic, humid ‘Summer Bummer’, yet still feeling as essential to the album as a classic Lana ballad like ‘Heroin’, or better yet, the evergreen ‘Change’.

What makes the album pop, then, is her writing. Lana has always been an excellent writer, having amassed a real penchant for worldbuilding, especially on 2014’s cult classic Ultraviolence. Up to this point though, and perhaps the worldbuilding adjective is indicative enough, she’d dabbled more in fairytales reflective of her feelings and experiences instead of having a sense of herself stamped into her music. I would tell you that Lust For Life is the album to buck that trend, by kicking so many of her fatalistic, dark clichés to the curb. Perhaps it was part of the liberal reaction to Trump taking office that would later inspire the autopsy of a nation on 2019’s beloved Norman Fucking Rockwell!, but there’s an element of observation and stream-of-consciousness that come across as lived-in and sincere compared to the fantastical ideals of her past. “Is it the end of an era?” she asks in ‘When The World Was at War We Kept Dancing’, cynical of the future but strangely optimistic in her response later on the song, that ‘we’ll have a happy ending’. The beach she finds solace in on ‘13 Beaches’ lay “past Ventura and lenses plenty, in the white sunshine”, acknowledging the fame that she has amassed and shaping it into an authorial voice. Lana feels flesh and bone and personable on the record in a way she never had before. For the stupor-esque haze the album remains within, where Spanish guitars bleed in and Spectorish drum hits bleed out, there’s a sense of humanity and empathy permeating the entire record that lends the messiness its candor. That even extends into her singing, as she finds herself more comfortable in her head voice than ever, all the while still keeping her idiosyncratic, vintage delivery intact.

Not all of the album works, to be fair. Cuts like ‘Cherry’ feel ultimately superfluous in the grand scheme of things, and the lengths on these tracks do get tiresome. It lacks the cohesive appeal of works like Ultraviolence, and her writing has proven stronger in both works before and after. But again, that messiness she assumes sonically and lyrically is largely important to creating the all-immersive power this album has kept. For such an oddly personal record, Lust for Life may be Lana’s biggest record of capturing a vibe, its summery, oddly observant yet ultimately hopeful energy, a yearning for a past that once was. More importantly, despite the bloat, it doesn’t come across as overproduced or her extending reach in the least, like some of her prior works do. And if her initial mission, like the aesthetics of nostalgia platforms like Tumblr, was to recapture that sort of rosy-coloured past, no album of hers does it better this.

More importantly, Lust for Life dictates the turn her career would take in its wake. Though Lana would ultimately ditch the trap aesthetic in favour of slowcore ballads and 70s soft rock on later efforts like Blue Banisters, the formal expansiveness very much hints at the progressive, free-flowing songwriting she’d very much continue to adhere to, and the personal voice she begins to assume here would further take shape. You can even find that in the florid titling of songs like ‘Coachella - Woodstock in My Mind’ and ‘Beautiful People Beautiful Problems’. Arguably, that personability, found in later lyrics like “you write, I tour, we make it work” or “I can’t help but feel my body marred by my soul, handmade beauty sealed up by two man-made walls”, would become so key to the critical re-evaluation of her work and the hosannas that she continues to amass into her career. It depicts Lana at an inflection point; not quite at the zenith of her popularity, but at a point where her stardom finally lets her take off the mask somewhat, and allows her to venture into territory she’d once cordoned off. We wouldn’t know it then, but it’s an album we’re ultimately all the more richer for having. It became her commitment, her modern manifesto.