Lana Del Rey is smiling on the cover of her new album. Such is her brand loyalty to pained poise and misery, the joyful precision on Del Rey’s 2017’s face seems almost ironic. (Del Rey recently admitted that she no longer sings the Crystals-sampling lyric, “He hit me and it felt like a kiss” from her song Ultraviolence.) Still, Del Rey’s music has always been more about a feeling than an explicit lyrical message. But, in the current climate of laborious genre-hopping and guest vocals on throwaway chart tracks, Del Rey has remained a mystery.

Source: The Guardian July 21, 2017 09:56 UTC