Norman Fucking Rockwell!

Lana Del Rey is large – she contains multitudes, and the way she balances and embodies them on her fifth album is nothing short of stunning.

On her elegant and complex fifth album, Lana Del Rey sings exquisitely of freedom and transformation and the wreckage of being alive. It establishes her as one of America’s greatest living songwriters.

Norman Fucking Rockwell! proves (again) Del Rey as a fully-realized artist who has remained true to her obsessions — aesthetic, cultural, and personal — outlasting the misogynist criticisms that could have derailed her early career. Del Rey delivers a gaze that swivels internally and externally, that can simultaneously observe our national existential dread and her own sudden hope for a “Hallmark” love.

It's a remarkably sharp pop record that retains her fascination with pop-culture iconography and the rosey simplicity of a post-war America where classic rock and blue jeans ruled and takes them to much deeper places. ... Think of it as an hour-long car ride peeling down the highway with classic rock blaring out of the radio and no real destination in mind other than where your impulsive nature might take you.

Although the album’s new psychedelic undercurrent absolutely deserves mention as a previously unexplored avenue for Del Rey, even with the new dimension, this is unmistakably a Lana Del Rey album, optimized for languid West Coast afternoons: contemplative, moving, and thematically consistent music to get lost inside.

Norman Fucking Rockwell is Lana Del Rey unfiltered, full of beauty, emotion, heartbreak, and devastation.

While “Norman F—ing Rockwell” may not win over too many of the unconverted, also like a Tarantino film, it finds Del Rey placing new sounds, ideas and scenery into her fairly monochromatic framework, while still remaining completely on-message.

Whether it’s a modern California of wildfires and livestreams, or a nostalgic glance at a James Dean, Marilyn Monroe make-believe - it’s Lana Del Rey’s world, we’re just living it.

The patient flow, risky songwriting choices and mature character of the album make it the most majestic chapter of Lana Del Rey’s continuing saga of love and disillusionment under the California Sun.

The long-awaited Norman Fucking Rockwell is even more massive and majestic than everyone hoped it would be. Lana turns her fifth and finest album into a tour of sordid American dreams, going deep cover in all our nation’s most twisted fantasies of glamour and danger. No other songwriter around does such an expert job of building up elaborate romantic fantasies, and then burning them to the ground.

Here, she’s working toward something bigger than her own feelings. She doesn’t ask us to weep for her—she captures the drama and despair of a nation, with wit to spare. Lana Del Rey is not just your little Venice bitch. She’s our little Venice bitch.

A thematically rich record, heavy on mood and elegantly written in a way that positions Del Rey between Eve Babitz and Carole King. There are beguiling and evolving melodies underneath the spare piano and acoustic arrangements. [Nov 2019, p.24]

Del Rey has certainly carved out her own niche in the world of singer-songwriters, much as the quasi-namesake of Norman Fucking Rockwell! did in the art world. This shows her refining that approach, adding a few new brush strokes here and there, but still providing a unique and fascinating tableau as a whole.

By this point, she’s probably preaching to the converted, and won’t attract anyone previously immune to the Del Rey charm – yet this is probably her finest record since Born To Die, and this new partnership with Antonoff ensures that her next move will much anticipated.

Being bombarded with mortality is a tall order for what is ostensibly a summer pop album; but rather than let her words fade into the background of washed synths and drum machines, as on previous releases, the breathing room in the production of Norman Fucking Rockwell leans into the intimacy.

It’s hard for any artist on their fifth album to cause you to sit up and pay attention as much as Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell does, let alone for an artist who is such a past master of the disengaged, dissolute swoon.

Happiness, for Lana, is a process. This album is a testament to her afresh stability and strength, and shows that hope might be a dangerous woman for a thing like her to have — but she’s finally got it.

The gratifying thing about this album — beyond its gorgeous melodies and Del Rey’s singing, which has never been more vivid — is that even as she’s mellowed her attack, her sense of humor has grown more pointed.

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.

Distilled to their barest elements, the songs on this album reveal themselves not to be hollow vessels for vapid self-absorption, but frank assessments of the psychic effects of a world spiraling into chaos. ... She’s made an album with the unfettered focus and scope worthy of her lofty repute.

Things inevitably drift, but beneath the surface in the best songs there is a toughness and a newfound resilience.

As a mood piece, Norman Fucking Rockwell does an admirable job preserving Del Rey’s mystique while moving her sound forward.

Yhe album is as allusive as the rest of Del Rey’s discography; Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, Slim Aarons and Stephen King are just a few of the notable individuals both subtly and explicitly referenced by the singer.

Over its 14 tracks, Rockwell keeps its midtempo mood steady, whether Del Rey’s characters are rushing down low-lit California highways or hiding out in anonymous Valley suburbs. The songs tend to flow into each other, although Antonoff and Del Rey’s partnership does result in some lovely musical moments.

This is her best album yet, and great moments abound amidst the fat.

Yet the over-riding sense of her almost unremittingly sombre sixth album, Norman F______ Rockwell!, is of Del Rey shedding veils of production mystery at the risk of being revealed as just another over sensitive and particularly self-absorbed singer-songwriter.