Maturing Del Rey doleful but with a wink
Time is weighing on Lana Del Rey on her fourth majorlabel studio album, “Lust for Life.”
At 32, she’s thinking not only about the troubled romances that fill most of her songs, but also about a next generation: flower-crowned children she sees around her at the Coachella festival, young lovers she notices on the street.
In the album’s opening song, “Love,” she looks at “You kids with your vintage music coming through satellites,” and she observes “You’re part of the past, but now you’re the future.”
That entanglement of old and new has been Del Rey’s gift and her strategy.
Some pop careers unfold as a progression, an implicit narrative of an artist discovering new ideas and choosing different challenges.
Del Rey’s catalog has been more like an Alexander Calder mobile: a fixed set of elements in a shifting balance, realigned with each viewing. “Lust for Life” is Del Ray’s most expansive album: It has 16 songs, stretching nearly 72 minutes.
The album also, in rare moments, hints at a wink behind the singer’s somber lullabies.
Del Rey has been a pop presence only since 2011,
when she released her single “Video Games” and her debut album, “Born To Die.” But her materials and fixations were already lined up. She would sing about love — usually going wrong — along with fame, drugs and stray thoughts about America.
She pushed, quietly and adamantly, against most expectations of pop in this decade. Turning her back on loud, emphatic, digitally hyped productions, Del Rey was whispery, with a soft focus. Her voice would stay gentle and sustained, using melodic leaps rather than lung power for emotional peaks.
Her music is a selfmade dream world: a slow-moving, gauzy, sad, glamorous, pensive, solitary realm, with Hollywood at its center and the rest of America somewhere in the distance, where she gently croons about fleeting pleasures and looming disappointments.
On successive albums, she tinkered with ingredients and proportions: a touch more psychedelic guitar on “Ultraviolence” in 2014, melodramatically dissonant string arrangements on “Honeymoon” in 2015. Yet her songs have remained immediately recognizable.
“Lust for Life” features new collaborators — Stevie Nicks, the Weeknd, ASAP Rocky, Sean Ono Lennon — but Del Rey brings them into her domain.
The Weeknd and Nicks signal the Hollywood decadence that Del Rey often chronicles and indicts: The Weeknd joins her in “Lust for Life” to sing about dancing on the Hollywood sign and getting naked, and Nicks collaborates on a piano ballad, “Beautiful People Beautiful Problems,” that teases at its own narcissism.
Working with Lennon on the pretty “Tomorrow Never Came” gives Del Rey license to try Beatles-style chord changes and sing about idolizing the Beatles while sketching one more lost-love scenario.
ASAP Rocky appears twice: on “Groupie Love,” one of Del Rey’s many songs about the perils of romance with a musician, and on “Summer Bummer,” which brackets ASAP Rocky’s praises with a piano dirge about not being able to let go.
Still, doleful love songs are Del Rey’s enduring vocation. An example is “Change,” a bare-bones piano ballad in which she resolves to “find the power to be faithful.”
And now and then, she turns the tables. “In My Feelings,” with synthesizers and trap percussion, finds the spunk to sneer at a cheating boyfriend. “Could it be that I found another loser?” she sings sweetly.
And she closes the album with “Get Free,” which hints at both old girl-group songs and Radiohead’s ‘‘Creep’’ as she resolves to dump someone: “I was not discerning / and you, as we found out, were not in your right mind.” The usual melancholy is there, but so is a wink.