Norman Fucking Rockwell!
Part of the fun of listening to Lana Del Rey’s ethereal lullabies is the sly sense of humor that brings them back down to earth. Tucked inside her dreamscapes about Hollywood and the Hamptons are reminders—and celebrations—of just how empty these places can be. Here, on her sixth album, she fixes her gaze on another place primed for exploration: the art world. Winking and vivid, *Norman F\*\*\*\*\*g Rockwell!* is a conceptual riff on the rules that govern integrity and authenticity from an artist who has made a career out of breaking them. In a 2018 interview with Apple Music\'s Zane Lowe, Del Rey said working with songwriter Jack Antonoff (who produced the album along with Rick Nowels and Andrew Watt) put her in a lighter mood: “He was so *funny*,” she said. Their partnership—as seen on the title track, a study of inflated egos—allowed her to take her subjects less seriously. \"It\'s about this guy who is such a genius artist, but he thinks he’s the shit and he knows it,” she said. \"So often I end up with these creative types. They just go on and on about themselves and I\'m like, \'Yeah, yeah.\' But there’s merit to it also—they are so good.” This paradox becomes a theme on *Rockwell*, a canvas upon which she paints with sincerity and satire and challenges you to spot the difference. (On “The Next Best American Record,” she sings, “We were so obsessed with writing the next best American record/’Cause we were just that good/It was just that good.”) Whether she’s wistfully nostalgic or jaded and detached is up for interpretation—really, everything is. The album’s finale, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it,” is packaged like a confessional—first-person, reflective, sung over simple piano chords—but it’s also flamboyantly cinematic, interweaving references to Sylvia Plath and Slim Aarons with anecdotes from Del Rey\'s own life to make us question, again, what\'s real. When she repeats the phrase “a woman like me,” it feels like a taunt; she’s spent the last decade mixing personas—outcast and pop idol, debutante and witch, pinup girl and poet, sinner and saint—ostensibly in an effort to render them all moot. Here, she suggests something even bolder: that the only thing more dangerous than a complicated woman is one who refuses to give up.
On her elegant and complex fifth album, Lana Del Rey sings exquisitely of freedom and transformation and the wreckage of being alive. It establishes her as one of America’s greatest living songwriters.
As a mood piece, Norman Fucking Rockwell does an admirable job preserving Del Rey’s mystique while moving her sound forward.
Lana Del Rey's 'Norman Fucking Rockwell!' contains multitudes. The way she balances and embodies them is nothing short of stunning
A typically enigmatic body of work from an increasingly precise, insightful songwriter
It’s strange that this week’s biggest album was almost entirely co-written with Jack Antonoff, who also co-wrote most of last week’s biggest album: Taylor Swift’s Lover. The pair could hardly be more different. Swift’s pastel-hued positivity on the zingy Lover feels galaxies away from this stack of smoky slowies, a stunning mood piece that must be Lana Del Rey’s most beautiful collection, six albums in.
On her thrilling sixth album, Lana Del Rey's darkly romantic California dreams can feel like epitaphs for the entire country.
The album is sultry and soporific, sitting somewhere between the minimalist trip-hop of Del Rey’s early days, and the scuzzy desert rock she has toyed with over the years
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“Out of the black, into the blue” — the last words Lana Del Rey repeated on her previous record 'Lust For Life' which ultimately
The American’s involving fifth album proves she can do more than merely conjure up a mood
The album doesn’t so much subvert an idealistic notion of the American dream as perform a postmortem of it.
Lana Del Rey's sixth studio album is a brazen, honest exercise in studied sophistication as well as the art of not giving a fuck.
Norman Fucking Rockwell! by Lana Del Rey, album review by Adam Fink. The Jack Antonoff-produced full-length is now out via all services
Del Rey goes back to her well of swooning melodies, twanging guitars, Twin Peaks-ish Americana and cinematic ballads about women in love with ne’er-do-wells
The idea of Lana Del Rey has essentially willed itself into being, sticking to the basic concept from the start and waiting for the rest of the world to not only catch up, but fully embrace the fabricated persona created by one Elizabeth Woolridge Grant.