Lana Del Rey review, Norman F**king Rockwell: New album shows singer at her most assertive

Lana Del Rey has always been obsessed with the past. Hers is a sound rooted in nostalgia, a paean to everything she was born too late to live through: old Hollywood, Sinatra, beat poetry, Sylvia Plath and Fifties Americana. At her best, she mines something fresh from it all. At her worst, she wallows in it. Her new album Norman F**king Rockwell, named after a 20th-century American artist, does both.

Co-produced by Jack Antonoff, as is now decreed by law of all female pop stars, 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. The drum beats are scarce, the piano, harp, and Guns N’ Roses guitar solos are many, and the melodies are more like musical mood boards. She sings of iPads and dropping pins, and it is almost startling that she has even heard of such things.

Often, Del Rey’s music has offered up a sort of anachronistic passivity. Her breakout single, 2012’s “Video Games”, was an infatuated ode to a deadbeat who drank beer, played computer games and yelled at her to “get over here”. “I like you a lot,” she sang on 2015’s “Music To Watch Boys To”, “So I do what you want.” An optimistic reading would suggest a faint sense of irony bubbling under the surface of such sentiments. A less optimistic one might accuse her of glamourising subservience.

This time around, though, things are a little different. “God damn, man child,” is the album’s first line, a statement of intent sung over bleating brass and harps. “I’m a star and I’m burning through you,” she sings on “Love Song”, which sounds like an alternative universe “Wonderwall”. And on the excellent “Mariner’s Apartment Context”, she declares – just as Leonard Cohen and George Michael did before her – “I’m your man.”

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This is Del Rey at her most assertive – personally, if not politically. Those hoping for a barbed protest record in keeping with Del Rey’s newfound public activism (last year she called President Trump a “narcissist” who “believes it’s OK to grab a woman by the pussy just because he’s famous”) will be disappointed. But it is gratifying to hear her take control. Aside from “Happiness Is a Butterfly”, that is. “If he’s a serial killer, then what’s the worst that can happen to a girl who’s already hurt?” she asks. Crikey.

The album is as thick with fawning tributes as ever – so thick that it almost turns to sludge. Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, Crosby, Stills and Nash and The Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson are all given a shout-out. At least she seems to have laid her love of beat poetry to rest.

“We were so obsessed with writing the next best American record,” sings Del Rey on “Next Best American Record”. This isn’t it, but it’s pretty great all the same.