LANA DEL REY - LUST FOR LIFE (2LP) VINYL

"Lust For Life lets a bit of light into the darkness of Del Rey's moody past works, hinting at emotional recovery without drastically altering her sensuous musical palette." — The Telegraph (U.K.)

The fourth full-length album from the pop singer-songwriter. Featuring guest appearances from A$AP Rocky, Sean Ono Lennon, Stevie Nicks, Playboi Carti, and The Weeknd.

Lana Del Rey's albums are swanning, magisterial projects, as long as some films, except that films have multiple characters. Her stage has just one spotlight; the plot usually traces doomed loves and open roads, rarely interpolating an event more current than the Kennedy assassination.

Yet with 2017's Lust for Life, writes Spin, Del Rey is doing witchcraft against Donald Trump, and unlikely cracks of sun are peeking into her aura of gloom. Her fourth full-length opens on the pneumatic purr of "Love," as calm and satisfied a song as she's ever written.

For the first time, there are guest artists, representing an already well-established spectrum of sonic and creative inspirations: The Weeknd, Stevie Nicks, A$AP Rocky, Sean Lennon, and (barely) Playboi Carti. On "Coachella-Woodstock in My Mind," Del Rey observes Father John Misty, nuclear standoff with North Korea, and her own songwriting process in real time.

Lust for Life is a spectacular 72 minutes long. It trades in the same intently, atmospherically narcotic sound Del Rey and primary producer Rick Nowels have favored since the beginning. In place of Ultraviolence's strung-out surf guitar and Honeymoon's soporific strings, Life has a few cloudy synthesizers and samples of the wind. "13 Beaches" opens with a clip from Carnival of Souls, a half-forgotten 1962 cult horror perfectly in line with Del Rey's love for eerie, cinematic Americana. On Lust for Life, Del Rey relishes her position as a kind of cultural medium. "Beautiful People Beautiful Problems" steadies itself on Stevie Nicks' richly honied vocals, and the song itself (on which Nicks receives a co-writing credit) is a more-than-passable homage to her style. For the length of the line, "When I love him get a feelin', somethin' close to like a sugar rush," you'll wish they'd recorded a whole album together. Meanwhile, "Tomorrow Never Came," Del Rey's duet with Sean Lennon, seems an obvious attempt to raise the vibration of his father.