Honeymoon

On the cover of Honeymoon, we see our star, Lana Del Rey, the idle passenger of a parked convertible Hollywood tourmobile, gazing behind her through face-obscuring shades. As an artist, she's never shied away from the obvious, but the image feels almost too on-the-nose, too apt—Lana doing The Full Lana. And yet, that's exactly what Honeymoon gives us—it is Lana Del Rey's purest album-length expression, and her most artistic one.

Accordingly, Honeymoon is a dark work, darker even than Ultraviolence, and the pall does not lift for its 60-plus minutes. It's an album about love, but "love", as Del Rey sings it, sounds like mourning. The romance here is closer to addiction—something that's sought for its ability to blot out the rest of life's miseries. On the title track, when she croons "Our honeymoon/ Say you want me too", she's dopily hopeful as Brian Wilson singing "We could be married/ And then we'll be happy." The album luxuriates in this bleak space between dream and reality, which stretches endlessly from one melancholy track to the next. It's not until "The Blackest Day", eleven songs in, that Honeymoon's static depression gives way to apocalyptic ecstasy, as she gasps "In all the wrong places/ Oh my God" in multi-tracked harmonies on the chorus. The moment is Honeymoon's emotional apex, but it still moves at the pace of a funeral march, and the release it depicts is that of embracing rock bottom.

The morose orchestral grandeur of the album feels like an arrival point, and also possibly a dead-end: the sentimentality and drama throws back to old Hollywood film scores. The setting is pitch-perfect and a million mothballed years away from the current pop landscape; it's strange, a barometer of youth culture trading in such old music. As a singer, Del Rey sounds more like the singer of her pre-Lana Lizzy Grant days here, when she was was performing torch songs in secretarial skirts at A&R showcases, looking too young to seem so haunted. Her previous two records felt like earnest stabs at finding a pop context for that voice, but they were both overwrought, and Honeymoon's arrangements feel built to rectify that.

Honeymoon acknowledges what, or rather who, we are here for. It knows that we want big, sad, fucked-up epics. It's rare to get to a chorus within the first minute, and until that point it's usually just Lana, maybe a little guitar or some cinematic strings. The programmed drums of "High by the Beach" and "Religion" wait nearly a minute to enter, and "Terrence Loves  You" is even sparser. Many tracks expand sleepily past the five- or six-minute mark, which is to say that Honeymoon's languor takes our attention for granted. Which is certainly not a mistake.

While she's obviously a pop artist, Honeymoon feels as though it belongs to a larger canon of Southern California Gothic albums—Celebrity Skin, Hotel California, The Hissing of Summer Lawns. She sings about it all—the sprawl, toxicity, the culture of transactional relationships, the particulars of the light ("God Knows I Tried")—with an East Coast blue-blood accent ("scared" becomes "skaaaahd"). All the gee-whiz irony of previous albums is gone, often she sounds like ABBA's Agnetha Fältskog roused from a nap, sweet but disconnected.

Like Joan Didion's ur-California girl transplant, Maria Wyeth, Del Rey sings like a woman who "knows what 'nothing' means"—on "High by the Beach", "Freak", and "Art Deco" she sounds beyond longing, like it's been a long time since she felt anything at all. She is cruelly incisive on "Art Deco" ("you're just born to be seen"), a highlight that curdles when the careless phrase "You're so ghetto" comes out in the chorus. It's one of the few tonal misfires on an album that otherwise feels like Del Rey moving into the temple she's built.

She has been transfixed by, and riffing on, America since the beginning, but Honeymoon pushes past easy Kennedy kitsch and undulating flags to mine something more specific. In the opening track, she sings "We could cruise/ To the blues/ Wilshire Boulevard," and the name check is shrewd. One of L.A.'s earliest thoroughfares, a locus of establishing the city's car culture, Wilshire runs sixteen miles, and as architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne writes, "can take you from a world-famous piece of architecture to a weed-choked lot, from a realized ambition to an abandoned one, in the space of a few blocks."

In the following verse, she replaces blues with "news" and substitutes "Pico Blvd.", which is working class for its duration, bi-secting Koreatown and running through Ecuadorian, Salvadoran, Russian, and Mexican communities. The juxtaposition is startling and canny. In the space of one lyric, she posits the invisible, real city running parallel to the gleaming, manufactured one, sketching an arterial map of a city coursing with ambition. It reminds us of something that was the very issue with Del Rey that irritated some early on—she knows exactly what she is doing. Honeymoon just synthesizes ideas she's been vamping on from the beginning into a unified work. She figured where she was going long before she got there; with Honeymoon she has finally arrived.