Since I started high school, Lana Del Rey has released three albums, one in each grade.

Freshman year, it was Chemtrails Over the Country Club. Sophomore year, it was Blue Banisters. Her most recent album, released March 24 of my junior year, is called Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd. 

The title definitely threw me for a loop. She has always had eclectic music with interesting lyrics and musicality, so I was eager to hear what was in store for me with her ninth studio album. 

Now, while I thought the album name was strange, some of the titles for her song were even more confusing and odd. The eleventh track on the album was literally titled “Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing (feat. RIOPY).” While I absolutely hated the name of the track, I couldn’t help but fall in love with the actual music. The tune of the piano during the verses reminded me of a lullaby. This, mixed with her ethereal voice, created such a soothing sound that I could not get enough of. The song had a perfect buildup to a calm explosion toward the end then settled back down to just her singing and piano at the end of the song. If she just changed the title, this song would have zero flaws.

My absolute favorite song on Del Rey’s new album is “Paris, Texas (feat. SYML).” Once again, the piano is enchanting. The song creates a beautiful image in my head, one with a small cabin and a cobblestone path, surrounded by tall grasses and wildflowers, no other buildings nearby. This song is incredibly delicate, and Del Rey’s voice carries out the ambiance of this track perfectly. Unlike “Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing,” “Paris, Texas” doesn’t have any sort of buildup, and the tone stays the same for the whole song. While normally I would get bored with songs like this one, the shorter length of the track and the song itself make any sort of climax unnecessary. It is an absolutely beautiful song that transports me to another world.

While it may seem from my review thus far that Del Rey’s album was flawless, there are some aspects that I truly don’t like, nor do I understand why she added them. The fifth and seventh tracks on her album are both interludes of different people talking. Both of them together totaled around eight minutes wasted on the album. The first interlude, “Judah Smith Interlude,” even caused some controversy with her listeners. Smith is a pastor who is known for making incredibly homophobic remarks. And since a large chunk of Del Rey’s fanbase is part of the LGBTQ+ community, they were dumbfounded over the fact that she would include this in her album. The irony here is that the track right before, “A&W,” is about evaluating her identity over her past, present, and future, while also contradicting all the points Smith made in the sermon that was recorded and used for the interlude. Along with that, Del Rey and her friends are heard laughing and commenting on the statements that Smith is making in the sermon as he is nowhere near preaching the word of God, but rather preaching his ideological opinions. 

The second interlude, “Jon Batiste Interlude,” Del Rey created with Jon Batiste, who was the winner of the Album of the Year Grammy award in 2022. This interlude had a much more positive spin to it than the “Judah Smith Interlude.” Batiste and Del Rey are heard exclaiming their excitement for a certain emotion. While this emotion is never specified, Batiste continuously says that he can feel it in his soul, and the last lines of the song are him describing this emotion as “sweet honey.” There are many ways to interpret this interlude, but the way I like to look at this track is that it was a recording of the two of them talking about the song “Candy Necklace (feat. John Batiste)”—which was the track right before this interlude—that they recorded together. Even though I enjoyed this interlude more than the latter, I still feel as if it was redundant and took away from the mood of the album as a whole.

Del Rey will never cease to leave me in awe with her music. Though this album is not my all-time favorite of hers—Born to Die is, of course—there are songs on Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd that will forever stick with me as some of the best songs that Del Rey has ever created. Now, of course, I can only hope that she releases her next album during my senior year so we can come around full circle.