Honeymoon

For this record, Lana Del Rey went all out with her ambition, bringing her vision to life in a way that only she could. She's making music that only she could make, that possess a unique sound no one else is bringing to the table right now.

Honeymoon reaffirms her ability to make important, masterful pop music that doesn’t pay a blind bit of notice to fashion and it's all the better for it.

It’s stubbornly retro, and clearly that pleases the provocateur in Del Rey.

It's her first record that could be a classic rather than just name-checking a bunch of them. [Dec 2015, p.70]

Producing three major-label albums in four years has developed Lana Del Rey into an artistic innovator who fearlessly draws from style and substance across the past century, whose vision is completely original and not remotely predictable.

Honeymoon is by far Del Rey’s most beautifully made and cohesive album.

[The] 14 tracks feel bloated--less so, though, if one treats Honeymoon as a concept album, a 66-minute Quaalude-and-wine dream musical that spans the history of Hollywood and 20th Century cinema.

She’s been angry, and then bored of being angry, but now she’s just bored, and her boredom is entrancing.

From here, Del Rey will surely be forced to redraw the blueprint, but for now, this is her best yet.

Honeymoon is arguably the most Lana Del Rey album Del Rey has yet produced.

She’s created a world of her own, and on this latest record she sinks deep into its clutches.

As an art experience, Honeymoon is gorgeous, and needs to be heard in context with her atmospheric home-made videos. But as pop music, it can fall a bit flat.

An intoxicating listen, Honeymoon is designed for the red neon glow of a smoky cabaret bar, a Californian answer to the chanson tradition.

Whatever her intentions, they've led to her most genuinely thrilling music ever.

With a little chopped-and-screwed modernity, hints of jazz and Morricone-like soundscapes, there’s a timelessness to Honeymoon, and an intrigue that should linger longer than her previous LPs.

In “God Knows I Tried”, a reference to ““Hotel California” conjures up the mood of sun-baked dissipation, while she grudgingly confirms the dead-end revelation of celebrity, “I’ve got nothing much to live for, ever since I found my fame”. It’s a disillusioned rejoinder to the burning urge for fame that stains youth culture in the 21st century, and as such, fits in perfectly with the album’s overall sense of exquisite decay.

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.

No matter her self-presentation, her grip, the music is relentlessly Sad--and exhausting in its sadness.

Honeymoon isn’t quite as fine as Ultraviolence, but that’s less an indictment of the new album than high praise of the older one, which feels like an immediate classic. In any case, Del Rey’s rollercoaster of a career seems to have steadied on an impressively high level.

She fills the space with more intellectual depth than she’s shown before, incorporating T.S. Eliot’s apropos poem “Burnt Norton” as a space-age interlude. Ignoring the most offensively nonsensical of her lyrics (“Baby you’re so ghetto / You’re looking to score”), such a relatively monochrome album spans a breadth of cultural markers.

Under the cover of midnight, Del Rey has been exploring big ideas about eroticism, drugs, myth, the empty promise of YOLO, what it means to be a woman, and the American soul.

There are some bumps along the way, though, with Art Deco and Religion sounding almost too lackadaisical for their own good.... That said, when she gets the formula right, the results speak for themselves.

Where Lana Del Rey seemed weighted down by existential sorrow on her first two albums, Honeymoon seems comfortingly melancholic and that's the truest sign that it is the fullest execution of Lana Del Rey's grand plan yet.