Lana Del Rey’s latest album begins with the infamous singer-songwriter reminiscing about a time before fame. Sung in a fluttering soprano at the limit of her reach, White Dress portrays 19-year-old Del Rey in a tight uniform, working as a waitress in the mid-2000s and dreaming of what is to come. “At the Men in Music Business Conference”, she confides in a breathless race, the rising artist finally feels “seen”.
At the other end of the album is a cover of For Free by Joni Mitchell, in which the great lady of music pondered, in 1970, how a street artist can play “very well, for free” with so little applause, while Mitchell herself is winning like a celebrity. Del Rey’s album has more than one arc, but one is a numbers game. In the white dress she is alone; in the end, she is accompanied by Weyes Blood and singer and songwriter Zella Day, each singing a verse from Joni and joining in perfect harmonies of the period, weighing up the contradictions.
Throughout this excellent seventh exit, Del Rey often discusses the problematic business of success, his loneliness and his camaraderie. She approaches you in several bars, not just telling you her sign – Cancer – but her moon: Leo. In the middle is perhaps the biggest segment of this great album. A minor-tune folk song that doesn’t bother trying to be anything, but Yosemite goes back to Del Rey’s 2017 album sessions, Lust for the life, but it incorporates the concern of this album with handicrafts. “We did it for fun, for free,” she sings about her work, in one of Del Rey’s best vocals to date. In Wild at Heart, she claims not to be a star, waving obliquely to Princess Diana’s death – “the cameras had flashes, they caused the car accidents” – an impression only reinforced by repeated references to Elton John’s Sail in the Wind.
Fame is just a concern: Del Rey weighs the relative merits of change and constancy, of love and loneliness, all with intensely discreet instrumentation provided by the return of producer Jack Antonoff, who worked on Del Rey’s latest album, the equally extraordinary Norman Fucked Rockwell!. All of these nods are carefully sown through a set of songs that also reference each other.
The album title – Chemtrails Over the Country Club – could have been used in many of Del Rey’s previous records, pointing out how the contrast between the American culture of white picket fences and the dark and uncomfortable side of the nation does, a continuing fascination with the work of Lana Del Rey. Chemtrails “refers to a conspiracy theory that aircraft condensation is secretly mixed with harmful chemicals.)
But this is an album full of beauty and thoughtful autobiography that only a more experienced and confident composer could have made. Although one of his central songs, Dark But Just a Game, focuses on the more sordid side of the Los Angeles celebrity, the tiredness of Del Rey’s early protagonists seems to have been left behind, replaced by something less timid and more direct. These are songs full of combative vulnerability and unapologetic beauty, filled with reminiscences of Laurel Canyon and multitracked elegiac vocals. Del Rey came close to the conventional – but on its own terms. She will still be “crazy about pink champagne” (a form of MDMA), a barfly equally at ease in Calabasas – a celebrity enclave in the hills of Los Angeles – or will attempt a “Tulsa Jesus freak” back to bed.
Love songs continue to predominate in the work of this inveterate romantic, but throughout Chemtrails, Del Rey relies repeatedly on the guidance and solidarity of other composers. Like Weyes Blood and Day, singer-songwriter Nikki Lane duets with Del Rey on a plaintive country song, Breaking Up Slowly (apparently, there are more country songs waiting behind the scenes). This track evokes the suffering country singer Tammy Wynette and concludes that, where Del Rey’s protagonist could have clung before, separating is “the right thing to do”. In addition, Del Rey is also “covering Joni and dancing with Joan [Baez]”While Stevie [Nicks] is to “call the phone”. The album cover art finds Del Rey surrounded by his sister and a bunch of friends, all glamorous and, on purpose, in many skin tones. (Del Rey has been criticized for some misjudged comments online about the production of black women, which she claims have been misinterpreted.)
Del Rey is no longer selling a kind of compromised ultra-femininity; she’s doing “Louisiana two-step, high and bright” with her squad. In the title track video, your pack turns into sexy werewolves at night, perhaps referring to Clarissa Pinkola Estés Women running with the Wolves and the recent Disney + Marvel offer WandaVision as well as The Wizard of jaguar. Del Rey strives to clarify something very important: “I am not unbalanced or unhappy”, she sings, “I am still so strange and wild”.