Lana Del Rey beguiles in 'Honeymoon' phase
She's the self-proclaimed "gangsta Nancy Sinatra" for the Instagram generation.
Lana Del Rey is retro and reticent, pouty-lipped and polarizing, and an endless source of fascination in pop music. Ever since she bewitched music bloggers with her breakthrough Video Games in 2011, the 30-year-old New York native (real name: Lizzy Grant) has gotten Internet vitriol for her flat Saturday Night Live performance, indifference toward feminism and seemingly disingenuous details about her wealthy upbringing. And yet, she's weathered the storm and found crossover success: playing sold-out shows and festivals this summer, earning Grammy and Golden Globe award nominations, and releasing a third album, Honeymoon, out now.
With this new music, "it seems like she's doubling down on the mystery," says Billboard senior editor Alex Gale. "She's really honed in on what makes her individual and special, and it's gone a little more out there." Similar to how Amy Winehouse gave a modern edge to jazz and soul, Lana will "take these old sounds and put new references in them. Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach, they're not going to say they're getting high on the beach. There are very 2015 touchstones in her lyrics."
Leading up to Honeymoon's release, Lana has released a handful of lush, cinematic teaser tracks and a video for lead single High by the Beach (in which she guns down a paparazzi helicopter). The new songs meld the hip-hop flair of 2012 major-label debut Born to Die with the rock-tinged melancholy of last year's Ultraviolence, which have sold 1.3 million and 534,000 copies, respectively, according to Nielsen Music. And while Beach failed to crack the Top 40 (her only top-10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart has been a Cedric Gervais remix of Summertime Sadness), Honeymoon is still expected to debut at No. 1, Gale says.
"You basically have to remix any of her songs for them to work on the radio," Gale says. "They're good songs, but they're just not made for the casual listener who's not paying attention. She's become a bit of an icon for post-millennials and they don't need a single. They're going to buy (the album)." (Fittingly, Honeymoon debuted at Urban Outfitters listening parties nationwide last weekend.)
"Her core demo is obviously young girls and she has a perspective in pop music that's not just sugary and bubblegum," says Complex writer Dana Droppo. "That's valuable for young women, too, to have a role model that makes you feel like it's OK to be sad and not just a sunshine-y little lady. But also, the whole world is a little bit confused by her, so she has a really diverse fan base" of older people, journalists and celebrities (most notably: Kim Kardashian, Kanye West and James Franco).
Droppo interviewed Lana for a Complex cover story last summer, knowing very little about the elusive chanteuse outside of the chain-smoking, lovelorn front she puts on in her music. What she found was someone who spoke candidly about her love life (she's recently been linked to Italian photographer Francesco Carrozzini), with an affinity for Old Hollywood, '70s music and the West Coast (an Ultraviolence single) that rang true.
"Considering her persona, I thought she might be calculating or closed off, which was totally not the case at all," Droppo says. "I felt like I had a conversation with this very interesting young woman. I wouldn't call her any kind of mastermind — there didn't seem to be any kind of motive for her answers." Afterward, "I believed more that her persona is really a part of how she thinks about her art."
Tim Jonze, music editor of the U.K.'s the Guardian, had a similar experience sitting down with Lana last year: describing her as "very charming and quite hypnotic," and "one of those rare pop stars who seem vaguely interested in you as well." At the same time, "I can spend a whole hour and a half with her and still not be entirely sure what's real or what's not," Jonze adds. "I don't see that as a bad thing or inauthentic. I see that as what makes her fascinating."
During the conversation, she chatted freely about darker chapters of her life — including homelessness and time spent with biker gangs (the inspiration for her Ride video) — and admitted that she wished she "was dead already." The confession caused an uproar online and was condemned by Lana herself, who criticized the Guardian and walked back on the death wish in a since-deleted Twitter scrawl.
That Lana accused him of "sinister ambitions" caught Jonze off-guard. "She plays with all those things — I mean, her album was called Born to Die. She has a long history of playing with that dark side of rock 'n' roll mythology," he says. "I think what happened was it was said to mean something Lana understood, and then when it came out, it looked quite irresponsible, perhaps, and she went into panic mode."
That said, "when I walked out of that interview, I didn't just think, 'Wow, she said that stuff about wanting to die,' " Jonze continues. "I was like, 'Wow, that was a really revealing, mesmerizing experience that you don't get with a lot of pop stars.' She seemed like a real pop star in a world where there's not that many like that."