I will love you til the end of time

Welcome to the latest edition of the Hell World Top 5 Songs series. Today we're discussing the music of the brilliant Lana Del Rey.

If you missed previous editions please check out the pieces on David Berman, Jason Molina, The Cure, Elliott Smith, R.E.M., Chris Cornell and Weezer.

Here's a playlist to listen along.

This one is really long so let's cut to the chase. As usual some of them are ranked in order and some are not who cares.

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Amanda Mull

Lana got famous the same summer that I moved from Georgia to New York City. I was 25 and had no money and was still trying to make friends, so I spent my first year or two here just walking around until my legs got tired and listening to music on my headphones. Almost 15 years later, Born to Die still takes me straight back to one of the most consequential decisions I’ve ever made, and to a time in my life and a version of myself for which I feel so much tenderness. For years afterward, it seemed like every new Lana album was the soundtrack of something else: A new apartment, a new breakup, maybe just a new summer. By nature, I’m a practical person and kind of a hater, but her music has access to something in me that I don’t have access to by myself—a doomed romantic, a fool, a lover.

Old Money

There was a period of several years where, if I’d had enough drinks and you found yourself talking to me at a party, I might try to make you listen to this one through the tinny speaker on my phone. It’s everything I adore in a Lana song—lush, melancholy, operatic, lonesome. It’s also got so many of the classic Lana tropes: Both Los Angeles AND New York, the color blue, a young person’s paradoxical nostalgia for youth, lost beauty, how much she loves her dad. Her voice sounds like velvet, backed by a full string ensemble and a piano. I’ve never had a single serious thought in my life about what I’d want my wedding to be like, except that I’d want to walk down the aisle to this song.

Florida Kilos

This is the other end of the Lana spectrum, set in a version of Miami that still has some menace to it and that is blessedly bereft of crypto guys. Our protagonist is a self-destructive dirtbag getting high on a boat off the Keys with a coke dealer boyfriend who she knows will land them both in prison eventually. Lana is absurdly adept at creating fleshed-out characters in the space of only a few minutes of music, and one of these characters’ most consistent traits is a total lack of any instinct for self-preservation. Her women long for lots of things—love or drugs or wealth or rough sex. But more than anything else, what almost all of them want is annihilation of one sort or another, and sometimes ecstatically so.

Both Old Money and Florida Kilos are off Ultraviolence, and I’m limiting myself to two from that album, though forgoing several others pains me. It’s my favorite Lana record by a mile, and I’ve noticed over the years that it’s also something of a litmus test. The people I know or have read who I think really get Lana all love Ultraviolence.

Born to Die

This is the song that got me fully on the Lana bandwagon. I had heard both Blue Jeans and Video Games before, but I didn’t quite get it until Born to Die, which gave me the context I needed on her sonic range to like both of those songs more than I had at first.

My favorite thing about this song, though, is the video. Everything about it is a perfectly absurd early 2010s Brooklyn fantasia—the throne, the flower crown, the bright red lip, the eyeliner, the white gown, the nails, the tigers, the scrawny tattooed miscreant who all this beauty and drama and emotion is centered around. (We’ve all been there, 2012 was like that.) Tonally, it’s so serious but also pretty funny, which is a tension that I think is at the heart of Lana’s whole deal. As modern celebrities go, she’s one of the few real weirdos we’ve got, and it’s often not clear exactly where the bit ends and the person begins—or, sometimes, if there’s any bit at all. As a fan, she keeps you a little bit unsettled, a little bit on your back foot. To still be curious about someone who’s been a huge star for 15 years suggests both a creative ambition and a genuine strangeness that I think are both admirable.

24

Someone should let Lana do a theme for a James Bond movie. It’s actually a travesty that no one has yet. Listen to this song and tell me you can’t see the Bond girl in your mind’s eye, clicking her castanets with genuine malice at our story’s hero.

In the meantime, this flawless Bond theme just lives on in the middle of the tracklist of a mid-career Lana album. She gives us so much! All she asks in return is that we continue not thinking too hard about who she might have voted for in the last election.

Love song

About a minute into this song, Lana sings “oh, be my once-in-a-lifetime” in a way that absolutely short-circuits my brain. For the rest of the song, I have to avoid thinking about anything in it too hard or I will burst into tears. The exact reason for this reaction remains somewhat mysterious to me—lots of Lana songs are love songs that I adore and that don’t have this effect on me. Maybe it’s the uncharacteristically spare production—just her voice whisper-singing over a piano—or the straightforward loveliness of the subject matter, which doesn’t include the signature Lana context of how terrible or doomed or stupid she already knows all of this is. It sounds like it was written about someone she loves who hasn’t done anything wrong yet. After 15 years listening to the fatalist queen of sad girls everywhere, maybe it’s just a little overwhelming to hear her sing about love that’s still good and still here.

Amanda Mull is a senior reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek.

Kylie Cheung

Cinnamon Girl

I feel like Lana is so appealing to her fan base because her music speaks to this primal experience of femininity—specifically, this inescapable, almost youthful experience of being a girl and romanticizing being screwed over by a man and still missing him. (Or maybe that’s just my read!) Apart from being an incredibly catchy song, Cinnamon Girl has this line—“There’s things I want to say to you / But I’ll just let you live”—that just holds so much meaning to me because it’s something I feel like we’ve all felt. It speaks to this pervasive feeling among women and girls that any emotion you express, especially to a man, is “too much." This innate shame and embarrassment that you’ve learned to attach to the very act of feeling, let alone burdening someone else with your feelings. But as I’ve gotten older, this line has taken a sort of new meaning to me. The song is obviously incredibly melancholic, but I’ve come to find the idea of just letting someone live—moving forward to the extent that you don’t feel compelled to relitigate old fights or reopen old wounds, or that you’re OK with unanswered questions, and OK with someone being wrong about you—is actually empowering rather than sad.

Ride

I was on Tumblr in the 2010s so this song has inevitably played an indelible role in my upbringing. The music video was obviously problematic for all the obvious reasons, yet, that said, watching it at 13, 14 is just a fundamentally life-changing experience for a girl. The entire song is just, for lack of better words, incredibly pretty and soulful, teeming with tension and yearning. The bridge (especially the line “I’m tired of feeling like I’m fucking crazy”) just feels like a drug when you’re a teen girl and feel this primal desire to run away from all these things you can’t even name. The power and timelessness of this song is such that when I listen to it as a 27-year-old adult with bills to pay, I’m transported back to my childhood bedroom, to being 14-years-old and aimlessly scrolling Tumblr and reblogging Born to Die GIF sets at 3 am on summer break.

Let the Light In

I don’t have much to say about this song beyond that I just love its melody and sincerity. In her voice and in the lyrics, you just hear the sound of someone who is sincerely and earnestly in love. The instrumentals, the soft country vibe, the soulfulness and oldness all come together and just feel like Lana at her most Lana, which is obviously a delight.

Video Games

Video Games is similar to Ride in that I don’t know or want to know what girlhood would have felt like without it and, specifically, without discovering it on Tumblr. It also has the same timelessness where listening to it, you’re transported back to where you were the first time you heard it. And to hear it for the first time as a teen girl, you conceptualize what it must feel like to be deeply, singularly in love with someone for the first time. It’s always astounding to me that this is Lana’s first single because it’s so beautiful and unique; it just carved out her niche of what critics have described as “tragic glamour” as the perfect opening act. And the music video—what it did for Tumblr girls in the 2010s, you really just had to be there.

Brooklyn Baby

Ultraviolence is probably my favorite album and Brooklyn Baby is probably my favorite song on it. The entire album has this sort of darkness and heaviness to it, except for this song. I’m foremost just obsessed with the melody, because the lyrics aren’t especially relatable to me as someone who wasn’t an artsy creative-type living in Brooklyn at the same time Lana was. Where Video Games was her first single, Brooklyn Baby almost has the feeling of her origin story and describing her roots as an artist, and it has this feeling of transporting you to a sort of hipster golden age. All of that said, it was hard to pick just five songs—my honorable mentions would be West Coast, Salvatore, Peppers, A&W, and How to Disappear, FWIW!

Kylie Cheung writes about gender and power at the intersections of politics and culture. She is the author of Survivor Injustice (2023) and Coercion: Surviving & Resisting Abortion Bans (2025).

Katie Way

Lana Del Rey made me the woman I am today, which is not something I say lightly. I heard her music for the first time at the most impressionable moment of my life. Video Games, of course. I was sixteen years old and so ready to be somewhere and someone other than a teenager in the Obama era suburbs of northern Virginia, and it felt immediately obvious that Lana was making music for me—a girl who would, during fights with my weed-dealing high school boyfriend, open his car door and threaten to jump out while he was driving. On Born to Die, her schlockiest album (but still, forever, my favorite), she was messy and strung out, deranged and desperate, but also sexy and cool, and so, so glamorous, even when she was sad, which, if you believed what she was singing like I did, was all the time. I was hooked. As an artist, Lana has matured. She’s dropped the Lolita schtick, the American flag and the flower crown, and the “white girl with swag” hip-hop bent, and instead stepped into her own as a songwriter in a way that has made her a totally singular voice in pop music. And of course, I’ve matured too, thank God. 

But we’ll both always be bad girls, honey, and that’s why I love her.

Every Man Gets His Wish

I love a lot of Lana’s unreleased music, recorded either under the LDR moniker or as Lizzy Grant (her pre-record deal, pre-lip filler persona)—TV in Black and White and Kinda Outta Luck are both great—but this one is my favorite. Every Man Gets His Wish has her whole early career hallmark sexy road trip Americana living for male attention lyric soup thing going on (“We’re gonna party like it’s 1949”? OK?) like a lot of the material that made it onto the first release of Born to Die, but the production on this song is a lot more fun than most of her debut album: The funky little whistle at the beginning, in particular, takes the cake for me. Plus, “He loves my heart-shaped sunglasses/He loves the heart shape my ass is/Cristal, crystal champagne glasses” is a Lana all-timer.

Sweet Carolina

I haven’t listened to Blue Banisters as much as I have some of Lana’s earlier stuff, but I love this song—the vocal performance is so stellar. Both Lana’s father Rob and her sister Chuck get co-writing credits on this one, and lyrically, I find it so sweet and tender, especially because it’s apparently addressed to the latter. The rare Lana song I’ve cried to when I wasn’t going through a break-up!

A&W

Sooooo epic. Maybe Lana’s most epic since Ride? (Or is that Dealer?) Anyway, I love when she takes on Themes and does Commentary—it’s so human and real. She’s got such a depth of feeling here in the first five minutes, and then that sexy, slinky, weird last two minutes send it off and keep A&W from being insanely sad… awesome.

hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but i have it

The critical reaction to Norman Fucking Rockwell! was the big “I Fucking told you so!” moment for OG Lana fans, and well-deserved—this whole album fucks, and honestly, I could have subbed almost anything from it in here, but hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have — but i have it is a really perfect mission statement for the whole Lana Del Rey project, in my opinion; running around like a maniac, maintaining an unquenchable optimism despite being, in a turn of perfect phrasing, “2/7 Sylvia Plath” is what womanhood is all about sometimes, no?

Video Games

Come on. No other choice here! It’s the GOAT.

Katie Way is a reporter and worker-owner at Hell Gate and the most famous woman you know on the iPad.

Grace Robins-Somerville

5. Video Games

Spring 2012, eighth grade. S and I were sleeping over at J’s house. After J’s parents had gone to bed and the three of us were hopped up on empty calories and the rush of stalking our crushes’ Facebook pages, S pulled up YouTube to show us Lana Del Rey, who she described as “this really cool singer my brother likes who kinda sounds like Adele.” S’s brother was a year older than us. He smoked skinny cigarettes, ran a black-and-white photography Tumblr account, plastered his room with drawings of Marilyn Monroe, and would take S to the Sephora counter on the weekends to do her makeup. My whole friend group wanted him as either an older brother or a boyfriend and we all sort of knew that he was gay even though it’d be a few more years before he came out. Anyway, if he said that Lana Del Rey was cool, we had to know who she was.

S showed us the music videos for Born To Die and Video Games. Born To Die was more elaborate, with its big-budget doomed romance. Born To Die had blood and live tigers. It had Lana and her tattooed boyfriend standing with their bare chests pressed together in front of a rippling American flag. Video Games, with its grainy quality and found footage collage, seemed almost low-rent.

When I was thirteen, Video Games gave me language for feelings I could only outline, coloring them in as I grew older and felt more. Long before I ever fell in love I knew it would sound like the hazy swirl of strings enveloping Lana’s honeyed contralto, that “it’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you,” sounded like running into open arms. Like most great love songs, Video Games has this undercurrent of sadness running through it. There’s a resignation to how she sings, “This is my idea of fun,” the same thing I feel each time I spend a perfect night out with friends I love, only to walk home wondering if the joy I feel now is as good as it’ll ever get, if that joy is enough for me, and whether or not it should be. 

4. White Dress

I tend to loathe the “famous pop star sings about how being famous sucks” genre of song, unless it’s done exceptionally well. White Dress by Lana Del Rey is an all-time example of how to do this type of song the right way, probably because it’s a song about nostalgia in which the beauty of the past isn’t necessarily dependent on the misfortune of the present. For better or worse, Lana’s past and present in White Dress are inseparable from one another. 

I have a playlist named after Cher’s famous 2012 tweet, in which she proclaimed “whats going on with mycareer” and White Dress is the very first song. It is THE “whats going on with mycareer” anthem, and it came at a very “whats going on with mycareer” moment for Lana. Norman Fucking Rockwell! had finally brought her long-overdue critical legitimacy but she’d been courting controversy in its wake—from the infamous sheer mask debacle during the height of the pandemic to her cringe-inducing “question for the culture” Instagram post. She’d never had more to lose. It makes sense that amidst all this, she might wish to return to simpler times, that the Men In Music Business Conference wasn’t looking like all that bad a place to be.

White Stripes-and-Kings of Leon-listening nineteen year-old Lizzy Grant skates along on a continuum with Lana Del Rey—pop star, provocateur, unlikely voice of a generation. I love White Dress because it exemplifies how Lana—a woman who has seemingly no interest in living a normal life or trying to convince the world that she’s just like the rest of us, a woman whose whole career has been marked by the public trying to figure out where the artifice ends and the real girl begins, a woman who continues to render questions of authenticity irrelevant—is the realest rock star we have. This is the woman who wears Ross Dress For Less to the Grammys and edits her promotional photos in PicsArt – probably on a phone that folds out into a wallet (the kind your mom has). This is the woman who sang hymns with Waffle House regulars and let the waitresses hit her vape on their breaks. This is Lana Del Rey, woman of the people. 

3. Mariners Apartment Complex

The best Lana Del Rey songs are the ones where she tells us exactly who she is. It’s one of the most rewarding aspects of being a longtime fan of hers, mapping the landmark songs that serve as microcosms of her entire creative ethos. Despite being so specific to the character of Lana Del Rey, it’s also no coincidence that Mariners Apartment Complex has become the soundtrack to the movie in everyone’s head, the theme song for the story where any of us can be the main character. I’m currently writing this in the Amtrak cafe car, which, to my childhood self, was the most glamorous, romantic locale I could imagine. To my adult self it still kind of is, so it feels fitting. Sitting here with my Amtrak hotdog and Diet Coke watching the Northeast pass by, I do feel like the kind of girl that’s gonna make you wonder who you are and where you’ve been. 

Mariners Apartment Complex is Lana’s take on the “I Am” song. Allow Lana to introduce herself, her studied love of rock history, her version of Californian mythology, her penchant for anachronistic Americana, and all the ways she’s been underestimated and misunderstood. The slow building guitar melody that kicks off this career-defining power ballad is years of Lana’s singular career path squished into just a few glorious minutes. After years of public flattening and decontextualization, of forging her own type of messy, hard-to-categorize stardom despite often being defined by the pitfalls and missteps, Mariners Apartment Complex is Lana setting the record straight. 

2. A&W

Listening to Lana in middle school felt like projecting my awkward adolescent self onto this avatar of idealized femininity. She was like a Barbie for girls who were too old to play with Barbies, a dramatized version of womanhood for not-quite-yet women. When I listen to Lana as an adult around the same age that she was when she first broke into the semi-mainstream, even the newer stuff still has me hyper-aware of my Russian nesting doll self (apologies for mixing doll metaphors). It’s the same way that part of me suspects that anyone who’s ever expressed attraction to me is actually joking—the part that’s piloted by a 12-year-old girl who got asked out as a prank that my entire homeroom was in on or by a 14-year-old-girl who got rated a 5/10. It’s the part that knows no amount of true love or feminist theory or dancing alone in my bedroom or orgasms from men who care about me will negate the slow weight of a life shaped by misogyny—whether it's of the eventful or everyday variety. It’s Lana noticeably lowering her voice while she sings the word “rape,” before admitting, “Won’t testify, I already fucked up my story,” and it’s the memory of a friend pointing out that I’d whispered the same word in the middle of a conversation spoken at a normal volume, and how this unintentional break in my vocal pattern gave me away immediately. It’s the crushing feeling that I was assigned a role once impending womanhood made everyone see me differently before I was even capable of seeing myself, the pain of knowing that there is a casually carefreeness and freedom and personhood that will always be out of my reach.

Marisa Dabice of the band Mannequin Pussy said that to be feminine is to be profane, and I liked that because it flew in the face of all the modern associations with “softness” that seem to permeate current discussions of “reclaiming” femininity (in which, more often than not, “reclamation” is really not reclamation at all, but an uncritical embrace of expectations). When I think of the ways in which I identify with femininity, it’s always been something spikier, dirtier, rougher around the edges. I’ve always gravitated towards women musicians who embody a similarly uneasy femininity, and are usually misunderstood or even vilified for it. 

You can hear that darkness, that knotty feminine mess reaching its fever pitch at A&W’s beat switch where the song winds back in time from Sunday morning mass to Saturday night at the club, from a heartbroken piano ballad lamenting fallen womanhood to a bratty schoolgirl chant over a pulsating trap instrumental. Distorted bass stretches the words “this is the experience of being an American whore” until they mean nothing, replacing them with Lana rapping about Jimmy Cocoa Puff (a name straight out of the Liz Phair book of naming fictional asshole boyfriends), and taking his bad behavior straight to the source: “Your mom called / I told her / You’re fucking up big time!” No more time for crying in the club, Lana says it best: “I don’t care baby / I’ve already lost my mind.”

1. The greatest

Both fear and fantasy are central to Lana Del Rey’s America, and perhaps to American life in general (not that I feel particularly equipped to make generalizations about American life). I am an American but I do not usually live in Lana Del Rey’s America. When I was in Los Angeles a few months ago I felt like I was there for a few scattered moments. Here is an excerpt of a journal entry I wrote during that time, painstakingly typed up from my terrible cursive handwriting:

Each day I have a different line from NFR! stuck in my head. Two days ago it was the “wah-wah-wah-wah-wah-whatever” from the Venice Bitch outro, yesterday it was the part in the chorus of The Next Best American Record where she sings, “We play The Eagles down in Ma-a-a-libu,” today it’s the little pips of “I have it, I have it, I have it” from the very end of the album. She was right—“it turns out California’s more than just a state of mind.” Tonight I am so in love.

I felt like the world was ending the whole time I was there and it was perfect. The whole time I was there I couldn’t stop thinking about how sad it’d be to leave and how beautiful it’d be to remember. LA didn’t feel like a place I was allowed to hold onto, it felt like a place where things ended. I listened to NFR! on repeat and thought about summer 2019, how it was the last summer before COVID and before I graduated college remotely into a world I had no idea what to do with. “I want shit to feel just like it used to / and I miss doing nothing the most of all,” sings Lana, and I think about how I thought everything sucked back then too, and how nostalgia doesn’t only comfort those who are suffering in the present—-maybe the best consolation prize we can offer ourselves is the knowledge that no matter how miserable we are in the moment, someday we’ll find some fucked up way to look back on this and miss it. Somehow the words “Kanye West is blond and gone / Life on Mars? ain’t just a song / Oh, the livestream’s almost on” won’t feel out of place in a sweeping, barn-burning, drink-along ballad at the end of the world—in fact, it’ll sound timeless, because if there’s anything Lana can do, it’s seamlessly weave a glaringly of-the-moment line into a time-collapsing classic. Everything changes and we’re always missing everything, and now we can miss things faster than we’ve ever been able to before. I think I love Lana because it’s in my nature to miss things, and that’s what nearly all her songs are about, and that’s why The greatest is, well, the greatest. In the future, everyone will be nostalgic for fifteen minutes ago. The culture is lit and I had a ball. 

Lightning Round Runners-Up:

Happiness is a butterfly

Almost every Lana song is best listened to on a sweltering night in a parking lot when summer has reached its peak and you’ve got this sinking feeling that it’s all downhill from here and the only way to combat it is by doing something emotionally reckless. This is that feeling to a T. 

Summertime Sadness

Patti Smith covering this song and dedicating it to the late Fred “Sonic” Smith made me sob.

National Anthem

Watching the music video for this song is maybe the only time I ever feel something close to American patriotism. 

West Coast

An exhausting kind of lust. 

Peppers

I could listen to this song anywhere and still feel like I’m listening to it while smoking a joint in nothing but a bath towel in my boyfriend’s parents’ backyard on a beautiful June day.

Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. She recently earned her MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her work can be found in Pitchfork, Paste, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Portable Model, Salvation South, and her “mostly about music” Substack, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.

Emma Garland

Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but i have it

It occurred to me recently that, apart from seeing her live once with a collection of the most clinically depressed bitches I know, I never listen to Lana Del Rey in company. She’s a companion for solitude, the yearner’s yearner. Singing along to her in public feels like getting up at open mic night and reading out the most damning paragraph texts you’ve ever sent after six shots of whiskey and some bad news. With a title long and stylised enough to rival a 90s screamo band, Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but i have it is the pinnacle of her cryptic-journal-entry style of songwriting. A near-six-minute waltz of pure vocals with a piano accompaniment, both so delicate a strong breeze could knock them sideways like washing on a line, there’s something isolated and anaesthetised about this song. It sounds like an institutional dispatch – further compounded by its references to Sylvia Plath and The Shawshank Redemption, though in Lana’s case the prison is other people’s perceptions (and possibly her stint in boarding school as a teenage alcoholic). “Hello,” she coos from God knows where, “it’s the most famous woman you know on the iPad.” All in all a great vibe to lock into when you’re alone in your kitchen at midnight, making a grilled cheese in your underwear and a t-shirt you stole off some guy.

Ultraviolence

Of all the singles that helped build Lana’s persona in her formative years – Blue Jeans and Video Games among them – for me Ultraviolence is the most accomplished. Between the classic film score strings, the vague references to “Jim” (possibly Morrison) and The Crystals, the cocktail of swooning and sadism (or “violins / violence” if you will – look alive!), it’s the ultimate refinement of her core themes: the American dream, celebrity worship, love as a matter of life and death. Released in the summer of 2014, the height of think pieces asking every single pop music video if it was “feminist” or not, Lana portrayed herself kneeling in a wedding dress and taking a mystery man’s fingers in her mouth. This aspect of her artistry went over so badly at the time that people would throw books about feminism at her in public – a period she described to Interview Magazine in 2023 as “trial by fire.” In hindsight, though, it stands up there with the best of Amy Winehouse as a timeless monument to the tension between desire and manipulation, salvation and self-destruction. The only regrettable thing about it is that fucking wah pedal on the chorus. 

White Dress

There isn’t a woman on this Earth who hasn't let out a monumental sigh, probably over the kitchen sink, and wondered how and why she managed to make life so complicated for herself. That moment for Lana comes on White Dress, in which she reflects on her life before fame came knocking and the men in music business conference turned all her pleasures into commodities. Maybe she’d have been better off working as a waitress, chatting up men on the night shift and listening to jazz on sizzling summer afternoons… forever. It’s a naive daydream expressed in almost illicit terms; the instrumental rising and pulling back; her voice, whispering so quietly it’s barely there at all in places, mourning a time when the simple act of pouring coffee in a tight dress made her “feel like a God.” It makes me think about body spray and Brittany Murphy and the last summer me and my friends were all desperately unemployed at the same time, and how we spent it drinking Coors Light and watching Jersey Shore until 3 am and buying bodycon dresses on a Topshop credit card to wear out on Saturday night and return on Monday morning. In short: an epic poem about the loss, and value, of girlhood.

A&W

An unbelievably cynical song for Lana. A seven-minute self-admonishment for being an “American whore” written in the middle of an on-again-off-again relationship with Salem’s Jack Donoghue, it slashes through the portrait of romantic delusion and dreamy Americana she spent almost a decade painting. The protagonist calls up one man after another to fuck her on the floor of a Ramada. She brings up rape and asks you to consider whether she looks like she’s asking for it. She describes herself as a ghost passing through other people’s marriages – “Did you know a singer can still be / Looking like a sidepiece at thirty-three?” (bars). It’s bleak and dirty and carnal, dragging her most prominent themes out of the romantic cover of darkness and into the cold light of day. It’s so sleazy you can practically see the carpet burn on her knees and smell the stale smoke stuck in the curtains. Then she wraps the song with a playful twist on Little Anthony & The Imperials’ Shimmy Shimmy KO KO Bop and threatens to call a guy’s mother. My girl.

The greatest

This song makes me feel like I’m absolutely wasted in a glorious dive bar at the end of the world. It’s clinking glasses and fireworks, piano sing-alongs and arms around strangers and calling someone you shouldn’t to tell them how you feel and hanging up before they reply. I genuinely hope it’s on when WWIII kicks off because Grok described Vladimir Putin as a bald twat, or whatever dumb thing will finally end civilization – and it will be dumb. Lana called it six years ago: L.A. is in flames. Kanye West is blond and gone. What else is there to say, especially now, besides “the culture is lit and I had a ball.” 

Emma Garland is a freelance culture writer / editor and the author of Gabrielle, a newsletter about desire. Her first book Tell All Your Friends: A Cultural History of Mainstream Emo 2000 – 2013 is due out next year.

Emily Yoshida 

When I tell people I’m a Lana Del Rey fan, it’s usually with the disclaimer or qualifier “unfortunately” attached. Unfortunately for me is usually what I mean, but probably also unfortunate for whoever I’m dating, and anyone subjected to my not-insignificant word count re: Elizabeth Grant in the public domain. 

I suppose it’s particularly unfortunate now, in the interminable run up to the next album Lasso/The Right Person — not because I’ve ever set my clock by Lana’s various proclamations over the years, but more because the new music so far is surprisingly boring and also she seems to have married a swamp-dwelling transphobe. Unfortunate! 

I’ve only really been a fan of like five things in my life, and I consider most of these developments to be whims of fortune, something I have no control or say over. It’s a compulsion, as is my emotional response to her output, like how I sobbed through the entire final episode of Andor.

Almost ten years ago I worked with a coder at The Verge to create an interactive lyric map of every repeated phrase and reference in Lana Del Rey’s discography up to that point. It took a very long time. “This piece seemed to have a negative tone to it,” said a commenter on r/lanadelrey. 

“I don’t see the negative tone,” someone replied. 

“Besides, she’d have to be a fan if she went through the lyrics of every song to construct this web.” 

See? Unfortunate.

OK, disclaimer out of the way. Lest you too think my tone too negative, how about this: I think Lana Del Rey is in a class of her own as a songwriter and artist in general, I’ve spent a lot of money and gotten on planes and endured one of the worst girls’ weekends ever in order to see her live, and I’m struggling to keep this list of five songs under 2,000 words. 

Blue Banisters

You could probably build a solid best-of LDR list just by picking the title tracks from each of her albums. Norman Fucking Rockwell, Ultraviolence, Did You Know… These are all S-Tier Lana songs that are… not on this list. Blue Banisters is a lesser loved Lana release, a collection of 15 near-uniformly downtempo piano ballads with neither the variety of musical ideas on Chemtrails nor the open-vein vulnerability of Did You Know… (except for the literal primal scream of Dealer which is surely on… someone’s list.)

So much of Lana’s latter-day mythology springs from the morass of COVID-19 and the wilderness of lockdown (as well as her many gaffes during that too-online time,) and this album and song sound inescapably 2021 to me (complimentary.) Just a few muted piano chords over a shimmering synth bed, but it sounds huge, mythical, and Broadway-worthy in its emotional scope. It's one of the most virtuosic vocal performances she’s given in my humble opinion; when her breathy delivery of the first chorus finds its edge, as on the words “give me children, take away my pain” — chills!! 

There are plenty of Lana songs about heartbreak, but this one seemed to mark a shift in the wind when it was first released — she’s talking about the particular grief of finding yourself alone in your late 30s, feeling the reality of age and how differently men treat you because of it, and finally finding strength among your girlfriends. I love this version of Lana. I felt quite connected to this moment, when she seemed to be embracing a kind of witchy communal sisterhood that could be as inspiring as the strong arms of a big bad man.

West Coast

You know, Brooklyn Baby was my favorite Ultraviolence song for most of the past decade, but everyone likes Brooklyn Baby. Heterosexual men love Brooklyn Baby! I don’t know what this says about me, but these days I reach more for the lead single off of Lana’s 2014 monochromatic psych-rock-by-way-of-Showgirls album. Part of the reason is that it’s fun to sing in the car, like much of Ultraviolence, so much of it in her narcotic seen-it-all-lower register. But it’s also just fucking sexy. All wah-wah’s and overdubbed vocals and smoke. If I was a Jumbo’s dancer I’d put this in my rotation.

The Next Best American Record

This song sounds like taking a drink or doing a line after 20 years of sobriety. It sounds like driving out at midnight to the desert house from A Star is Born (1976) to rekindle a love affair that brings out the best and worst in you. The early version of this song had “you” so obsessed with writing the titular record, not the eventual “we.” A brilliant edit that changes the entire chemistry of the song. The production is heady, vintage Lana — fuzzy drum machine over a shag carpet of bass — the texture of the seediest Weeknd ballads lit in golden California optimism. It builds to one of the best bridges of Lana’s career, and as it reaches its climax, a glass shatters, a scream echoes deep in the mix, and all is gorgeously lost.

(One of the great delights of being a Lana fan is how ideas and scenes resurface in her songs over the years, “Topanga’s hot tonight,” comes to us from 2017’s Heroin, and when I realized that 2023’s Peppers was unfolding possibly in this same architecture, with the Eagles traded for RHCP, I broke out into a big dorky smile.)

National Anthem

Believe it or not, in the year 2025 there are still Lana fans out there who are waiting for their fave to return to her Hollywood Sadcore phase. This would be the era she first came to fame in, when she infamously described her style as “Lolita lost in the Hood,” or more accurately, Sad Betty Boop with an Adderall prescription and a freshly torrented Ableton orchestral pack. (Ugh! Why is it so fun to clown on her!? Love you, Lizzie!) But why claw desperately for a long-gone past when we will always have National Anthem, the Bugatti Veyron of that moment, and perhaps of Lana’s whole catalog?

This is the song that finally made me a fan. I remember being at Grantland, editing a post about the astonishing beauty and poor taste of its A$AP Rocky-co-starring Kennedy pastiche music video and getting that uncomfortable itch — “oh fuck, do I love this?” The Born To Die era was marked by a shallowness so willful, so proudly waved about that it seemed it could only be concealing real, true love and pain. It’s camp! One minute she’s telling us with a straight face that “Money is the reason we exist,” the next you’re getting giddy second hand goosebumps from the “hand on the back of her neck.” That tension is still insanely delicious. By the time we reach the semi-rapped bridge, with its Hitchcock references and final admission of crushing emptiness, we’ve hit a Lana Bingo. It is a totally fair conclusion to come to that this song is everything that is wrong with our culture, but also, it is a cornerstone of the Whole Lana Thing and must be contended with. On a balmy summer night I will still roll down the windows, crank up those violins and fireworks and let the exhaust fumes and technicolor toxicity wash over me.

Ride Monologue

These days as Lana seems to pivot harder and harder into her alleged MAGA tradwife swamp era, those reliable and heroic folks on the internet who “never liked her anyway” will point all the way back to Ride as the moment when Lana “told us who she was.” Lyrics like “I believe in the country America used to be,” and the inescapable image of her in a warbonnet surrounded by biker dudes are treated as smoking guns, evidence that she’s always been a raging conservative at heart. To which I say: Sure, maybe! But it feels more pressing to me that the Lana of today has, at least for the moment, lost the ambition to create art at this scale, towering statements of purpose and deviance that feel like they’re on their own moral and political planet.

I saw Lana perform Ride in Tennessee in 2023, near the end of a gnarly year that left me feeling on the outside of everything of just about everything, broke and alienated and finally compelled to hit the road again, albeit in a Toyota Prius and not on the back of a Hell’s Angel’s bike. As they played a truncated version of this monologue over a retrospective supercut of Lana’s career, I kind of parasocially lost it. I resisted Lana for a long time because of texts like these, with their purple prose and empty-headed romanticization of our very evil country, but that’s not really what this monologue is about. It’s about the art life, and the courage to live it, and all the sacrifices one makes to live it — chief among them, loneliness. Loneliness is the common denominator of every Lana era, and it’s a loneliness I know in my bones. And that’s probably why I’ll always be a Lana fan. Unfortunately.

Emily Yoshida is a former critic, sometimes podcaster and filmmaker, and a writer on FX’s Shōgun. She lives between Lana Del Rey’s Hollywood and Denis Johnson’s Iowa City.

Miles Klee

I will always be amused and impressed by a friend’s observation that the heterosexual men who fixate on Lana Del Rey subliminally associate her with “their dad’s old girlfriend who died in a car accident in 1973.” It would be hard, certainly, to act as if there is not some kind of erotic fatalism working its magic on us, and maybe harder still to argue that Lana is not aware of this psychic thread, maximizing our nostalgia for things we can’t remember, for a country that never was. But there is also the pleasure of her almost frightening indifference to subtext: “My pussy tastes like Pepsi-Cola” is a lyric that seems to collapse decades of Madison Avenue brainstorms into a single unusable tagline—the sell the ad men were dancing around all along.     

On any given day I would choose five different favorite Lana songs. I would even choose all five from Lust For Life, honestly. Spotify says I have saved more than one hundred of them, which is a batshit total for any artist. Sometimes I say “so-and-so is one of my favorite musicians,” and I have like twelve of their songs bookmarked, total. Possibly the platform also sucks. Whatever. Lana Del Rey, forever, and ever. She seems to complement the sight of a skunk quietly rooting around in my lawn at dusk (what I saw as I put on her music and began writing this) as well as an hour of disassociation on the beach. Like so many great artists, she lets us in on a dream we didn’t know we were having.  

Please also note that I can’t justifiably pick Doin’ Time, because it’s a cover that accesses my inexplicable childhood obsession with Sublime, but listen to that.

Love

This song and this album (Lust For Life) were how I fell in love with Lana, at a time when I had moved hundreds of miles to be with someone I loved (and still very much do). I can remember, in fact, the sun-drenched park where I first listened to it in a daze, reflecting on this awesome, swooning shift in my life. It’s a majestic thesis statement for her, and the sheer audacity of the one-word title/subject/mood is supported by the grandeur of that timpani percussion, those slow-motion fireworks. To me, Lana’s best work feels somehow cinematic, and Love overwhelms like the kind of film that immediately becomes your whole personality. The tragedy is how you can’t write a scene that lives up to it. 

National Anthem

So slick and catchy it can be easy to overlook the meticulous construction here. It’s a melody that keeps interrupting itself with new and surprising thrills but never makes anything less than perfect sense. Also a good answer for anyone who thinks Lana glamorizes American empire and patriarchy, about as obtuse a take as the claim that Martin Scorsese wants you to embrace the mafia lifestyle. Yes, there are tempting trappings of luxury and hedonism, yet the fruit is poisoned, and you doom yourself with the very first bite. When she tells her lover how handsome he is—that she has caught the glint of heaven in his eyes—his betrayal is assured, the hope for safety in his embrace revealed as a tragic joke. A lot of straight women might relate.  

How to disappear

For whatever reason, I’m probably more lukewarm on Norman Fucking Rockwell! than the average Lana stan. That said, I am entirely absorbed by its understated, loungey assertion of her style. If she did a Las Vegas residency, these songs would be packed in between the showstoppers, and I would say she performs them with this kind of expectation. Wouldn’t you want someone draped on a grand piano for this Twin Peaks homage by way of Phil Spector chord progressions? The Roadhouse really ought to book her more often.

Tough 

Lana has so many fantastic collaborations with rappers and R&B singers, and this example became a sultry summer staple as soon as it dropped. Whereas she’s a basically invisible presence on that long-awaited Taylor Swift duet—yeah, I’m still kinda mad about it—she brings out the swaggering best in Quavo for this rich little ditty, which I’ve kept on loop for almost a year. “Tough like the stuff in your grandpa’s glass” is almost the exact opposite of her aesthetic, and it brings her voice into an ideal contrast.

Heroin

I don’t care what anyone says, this is better than the Velvet Underground song. Or at least better at doing something other than making the listener feel strung out and desperate (which you can give Lou Reed lots of credit for turning into sonic ecstasy somehow). Lana, however, creates the kind of rolling Pacific fog that will forever mystify and unmoor, and connects the hot rugged landscape of the living to the ghosts we can’t forget. The invocation of the Manson family alongside humid church organs is a daring, fantastical, maybe insane choice that pays off in the seemingly endless ebb and flow of her most associative poetry. 

Miles Klee is a writer for Rolling Stone and Flaming Hydra as well as the author of the books Ivyland and True False. A collection of short stories co-written with his partner, Mads Gobbo, Double Black Diamond, is forthcoming this summer. He lives in Los Angeles.

Rax King

1. High by the Beach

This is the precise sound that I come to Lana for: woozy, heavy, as if the song has been chasing Ciroq with Nyquil. At her best, Lana del Rey makes music to languish by, an elegant soundtrack for sophisticated ruin. There's no way to move to this song that isn't sexy. I once hooked up with a friend primarily because High by the Beach happened to be playing and what were we going to do, not roll around on the floor about it? The record ended and we never spoke about it again. I felt that Lana would be proud.

2. Norman Fucking Rockwell

Cards on the table: I find the musicality of this song a little boring. (Am I safe from LDR stans if I admit that here?) The jazz bar piano is nice enough, I guess, as are the gentle strings. The sound is reminiscent of Ray Charles's middle-of-the-road, Georgia On My Mind phase. But the lyrics hit a pitch of such perfectly delicious nastiness that the song's sonic dullness ends up feeling subversive. There's something extremely cool about singing "you fucked me so good that I almost said I love you" and "your poetry's bad and you blame the news" not in a bratty or punkish register, but as if you're playing piano in an especially fancy restaurant.

3. Born to Die

This song was my introduction to Lana, as I'm sure it was for many of us, and it still speaks directly to the part of my brain that is a melodramatic troublemaker. The moody and melodic lifting of the chorus, the velvety drawl of her voice, the unapologetic richness of the arrangement...the whole combination makes me want to send inadvisable texts until two in the morning. With the unstoppable trio of Born to Die and Blue Jeans and Video Games, Lana announced to us all that sorrowful slutty girls had their new high priestess. This sorrowful slutty girl has been following her ever since.

4. Blue Jeans

And, indeed, the rest of this list will just comprise that golden triangle of yearning, melodic Born to Die singles. As glad as I am to see Lana evolve as an artist over the years, I'll always be drawn to these overwrought early hits. Who, in 2012, was still uncool enough to keen "I will love you til the end of time"? Who was still loving that hard, with an entire orchestra's worth of instruments swelling behind her, begging some guy in jeans and a tank top to come back to her? No one but LDR, who made yearning and begging look stylish.

5 . Video Games

People were SO MAD at Lana for this song, which I can't really fault them for. Lyrically, it's about the narrator's inexplicable obsession with some guy whose only interests are drinkin' beer and playin' video games. "Heaven is a place on earth with you," she sings in a voice dripping honey. It's a sentiment I've certainly felt about guys who ignore me in favor of playing Dark Souls games, but tried not to advertise. People found her fawning desperation to be the worst kind of old-fashioned—Betty Draper for the microkini generation. Me, I don't think you can stop beautiful women from throwing themselves at useless shlubs just by refusing to sing about it, so I might as well enjoy the baroque lushness of Lana's abjection.

Rax King is the James Beard award-nominated author of the essay collections Tacky and Sloppy and co-host of the podcast Low Culture Boil. Her writing can be found in Glamour, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn with her toothless Pekingese.

She also wrote this amazing piece about the tenth anniversary of Born to Die:

Something private enough to feel like a hard-won prize

For ten years, love her or hate her, Lana Del Rey has been an aesthetically perfect Lana Del Rey

Welcome to Hell WorldLuke O’Neil

Andrew McNally

I don’t quite remember the first time I heard Lana Del Rey, but it may very well have been her controversial SNL performance, the one that caused Kristin Wiig to do a parody of it the very next week. I, like naysayers, had a negative knee-jerk reaction to it, but quickly I found myself asking, “is this punk?” Snootier critics lambasted her for blowing her big chance, but really she was following in a thin line of people who chose to use 30 Rock for a message. Sinead O’Connor ripped up a picture of the Pope, Fear snuck in slam-dancers to destroy the set, and Lana told everyone she couldn’t care less. This isn’t true, of course, but it was incredible character work. Already, she was establishing a persona of a detached 50’s starlet, one who cared only about celebrity and put off anyone who got close enough to her. Her lustful voice has always fit this bill, as has her in-character attire. Her music is sultry pop, sensual yet coldly distant. You don’t know where the singer ends and the person begins. Her image is one that announces that she’s not afraid to break the rules even though, in the 13 years since her big breakthrough, she really hasn’t done so. She’s hard to love sometimes, but by god has she put out a career’s worth of absolute classics. Thank you to Luke for burdening me with the near-impossible task of narrowing down my picks to a top 5. 

5. Video Games

To me, this is the quintessential Lana Del Rey song. The church bells, the harp, the torturous tempo and the theatrical vocals all scream of The American Dream-era pop, while the lyrics go right for beer and video games. It’s a song for a lonely American suburb, falling in love amid the decay while still wondering if there’s more out there. It’s the sonic version of a forced smile. The song lures you in immediately and never really lets go even as it lumbers on as slow as possible. It was her breakthrough for a reason! I don’t usually gravitate to an artist’s biggest songs but in this case it’s undeniable. This is everything Lana does best all wrapped in one mission statement.

4. Cruel World 

The Black Keys might have negative clout in 2025 but in 2014 the name still meant a lot, and having Dan Auerbach produce Lana’s second album rightfully raised some eyebrows. The opening song might be the closest thing to “rock music” she’s ever done, and it’s one of the biggest outliers in her catalog. Her longest song at the time (which held until Venice Bitch), it’s a drawn-out dream that opens the album and it heralded an immediate change towards guitar-pop. It’s maybe Lana’s most immersive song, which is a quality she’s always excelled at. It’s a rare one that breaks the pop songwriting template altogether. Put some headphones on and get lost in this one. I wish she had a few more like this. 

3. Let The Light In

The beauty of many of the best Lana Del Rey songs is the way she sets up this world-building notion of her being a 50’s star and then immediately demolishes it with either recent cultural references or blunt profanity. The beauty of this song is the way she keeps that pure 50’s image intact. The normally commanding Father John Misty shows up for this duet and fully lets himself get guided along by Lana, as she builds what’s ultimately a beautiful love song. Even though the lyrics dream of sleeping until the afternoon and getting trashed, this song has a pure innocence to it that Lana usually shuns. It genuinely sounds like a song that could’ve come out in the era that both artists half-heartedly emulate. This might just be one of the prettiest Lana songs. It just makes me feel warm, which isn’t a word I expect to be found too often in this piece.

2. When The World Was At War We Kept Dancing 

Lust For Life is probably my least favorite Lana album, but it did produce this absolute winner. It’s a confounding song, with Lana breaking character a bit to give the chorus an almost-forced jazz rhythm, while singing some of the most bluntly depressing lyrics in the LDR catalog. While many of Lana’s songs can be perceived to take place mid-century, this one feels like it’s here and now, even with Victorian references. It’s someone shaking you out of a nostalgic dream. Lana addresses the common feeling of Americans being fully aware that their country is shit and everything is getting worse, and knowing they’re powerless to do anything about it. Well! “Is it the end of an era? Is it the end of America?” Lana sings in a typically forlorn nature. This one came out in 2017 and those lyrics make it borderline unlistenable in a time where students are getting disappeared and all of our elected officials are licking the feet of AI grifters. Luckily, the song’s also catchy as hell. 

1. Florida Kilos 

I will never understand how this absolute gem – my favorite LDR song –  got dumped onto a deluxe edition. Maybe it’s telling as to how good Ultraviolence was that this didn’t make the cut. Apparently co-written as a theme song to a thankfully unfulfilled sequel to Spring Breakers, this is another aura-bashing tune that really couldn’t be less subtle. It’s about slinging cocaine, and not much else. The POV of a good girl already miles down the wrong path is what Lana does best, with this song acting as an open invitation to the listener to blow up their own life for no real gain. “Prison isn't nothing to me if you'll be by my side” she sings, carefree over a great acoustic guitar rhythm. Not really how prison works, but the sentiment is nice. 

Andrew McNally is a regular contributor to Allston Pudding and can be found at Boston-area punk shows.

Luis Paez-Pumar

5. Florida Kilos

Lana Del Rey will always, rightfully, be linked to California, but in many ways, Florida is the perfect counterpoint for her muse state. Whereas she sings of California as an escape, an open sky and Old Hollywood combining to create a form of Eden, the Florida of Florida Kilos is grimy, drug-addled, kaleidoscopic. As one of the bonus tracks from Ultraviolence, the song sounds like nothing on the record, harkening back to the more playful Born to Die, both musically and lyrically. (There’s even a cola present here, albeit not as jarringly as on Cola.) Lana has said that she was inspired by Cocaine Cowboys, and the song is co-written by Harmony Korine of all people—at one point, it was supposed to be a song for a Spring Breakers sequel; what a world that would have been—and those two facts make sense, because there’s a cinematic quality to even the silly “yayo yayo yayo” chorus. I tend to prefer Lana’s more serious songs, but for my money, there isn’t a better song where she gets to play around with her own persona. 

4. Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd?

I did not know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd, thank you, Lana Del Rey.

3. Venice Bitch

A lot of Lana songs sound like dreamscapes, but Venice Bitch pulls a neat trick of vacillating wildly between dreams and nightmares. On paper, the nearly 10-minute song is a relationship snapshot, filled with routines and “making it work,” but what begins straightforwardly-Lana in tone gets much stranger as it winds its way into your brain. “Oh god, miss you on my lips” is less romantic and more primal, and the placid guitar strums are joined by discordant synths that jar you from the reverie. Lana lets the vibe change organically, turning away from her yearning into vocalizing while the music gets slowly more jagged around the halfway mark, her words fading deep into the mix. It’s hypnotic, and when she returns, it’s a bit wearier: “Back in the garden, we’re getting high now because we’re older,” she sings before repeating two lines to bring the track, and perhaps her life, to an accepting conclusion. The repetitive “crimson and clover, honey, over and over, honey” gives away to “If you weren’t mine, I’d be jealous of your love,” pausing slightly before singing the word “jealous,” giving one of our strongest emotions an extra punch as the music fades away to put her center stage once more. 

2. Norman fucking Rockwell

As far as spiteful ex songs, the title track from Lana’s landmark 2019 album reaches heights in disdain and quotability that I’m not sure she matches elsewhere. From the opening salvo of “Goddamn man-child,” the unnamed subject of her ire comes off much for the worse here. “Your poetry’s bad, and you blame the news;” “You act like a kid even though you stand six-foot-two;” “You talk to the walls when the party gets bored of you;” it’s all brutal. Accompanied by a meaty piano and the haze of a California sunset, Norman fucking Rockwell might not have much to do with the titular painter, or even the rest of the album, but it stands out anyway as the transitional period from the more bloated early Lana records and songs and into her Mature Era. That this transition is marked with a takedown of pretentious love, then, is just another turn for the character of Lana Del Rey, and she was done singing about her baby and putting up with the horrible things he did to her. She’s pissed, and it’s invigorating.

1. Ride

There might be better Lana Del Rey songs, but to me, Ride is the most Lana Del Rey song. In its nearly five minute run-time, all of the bones that make up the skeleton of her music coalesce into one entity. If there’s one constant theme in Lana’s music, it's freedom. The freedom to be oneself, yes, but more than that, it’s the freedom to fuck up along the way, and the freedom to remake one’s own self-image until it matches with whatever they want to be. Ride is euphoric; just listen to how she sings “I just ride, just ride” after the chorus. It makes you want to jump in the passenger seat as she drives off a cliff, Thelma and Louise style, because in that moment of weightlessness, there’s so much possibility. When she smokes a cigarette at a harshly lit gas station in the often excessive and sometimes offensive music video, you want to spark up right next to her, except that it would ruin the solitary fleeing at the center of Ride. Lana sings that she’s tired of feeling fucking crazy, but there’s nothing crazy about wanting to escape, to be reborn. It’s the most American feeling in a catalog of Americana, and it’s the reason Ride stands out as her most singular and emblematic song.

Luis Paez-Pumar is a staff writer and co-owner at Defector.

Gaby Del Valle

The first time I listened to Lana Del Rey I was, like so many others, in my bedroom at my parents’ house, on Tumblr, full of unwarranted angst and malaise. And of course I thought: this bitch really gets it. A little less than a year later I was off to New York for school. It was an incredible time to be a girl and it was an incredible time to be in New York. That year every girl was wearing flower crowns and American Apparel disco shorts and these thin, wispy sleeveless secretary blouses and I was no different. We’d listen to Lana while getting ready to go out while putting on our disco shorts and secretary blouses and flower crowns and overlined lipstick and poorly applied winged eyeliner. I listened to American while being spooned in my twin XL bed by my 5’11” roommate-slash-best friend, who held me as I cried about the “older man” who had broken my heart. (He was 21; in hindsight, none of it was a big deal.) That summer I went to Coney Island late at night with a guy I was not quite dating yet and we climbed onto one of the lifeguard chairs and I kept thinking harlot starlet queen of Coney Island. It was all so dumb and so fun. 

I have since come to associate nearly every chapter of my life with Lana. There is a Lana song for every occasion, a Lana album that correlates with the three places I have made or contemplated making a life in: New York, Florida, LA. I’ve seen her live exactly once, at the Florida State Fairgrounds in 2023 with my little brother. The entire audience was girls in cowboy boots with little bows in their hair; some of the girls were 13 and some were 30 and I was one of them. As we were leaving, we walked past two girls who had gotten their car stuck in a ditch in the parking lot, which is really just a big unmarked field. More people gathered around as we all tried to figure out how to get them out of there and eventually there were enough of us to push the car out, all these women and girls down in the mud. 

I panicked when Luke asked me to pick my top five Lana songs because this is a question I’ve had to answer before (it was a topic of discussion in a formerly active, now mostly dormant group chat once, around the time of that tour. It was nearly impossible for me to pick a top five, but here they are, in no particular order except for the first.

Queen of Disaster

This is my favorite, hands down. It sounds like when you have a new crush, or when winter thaws into spring. I’ve listened to it on repeat for hours at a time, while cleaning in my room or lying around or thinking about a new crush. The lyrics are old Lana: she sings about a bad boy that she’s always dreamed of, his golden grills, how she feels gangsta every time she sees him. There’s a levity to it that her more recent work mostly doesn’t have, at least until the scream at the end which sounds like the end of a crush, the initial manic thrill fading away. It’s nearly impossible to stream—she’s never officially released it—so I have to go to Youtube for it, which requires a bit of effort to ensure I find the right version but it’s always worth it. 

Violets for Roses

I love basically every track on Blue Banisters, one of Lana’s least loved albums, but I love this one the most. It’s the perfect breakup song. If Blue Banisters (the song, not the album) is for the initial shock of it, the moment when all your friends rush to your side and listen to you talk about how lost you feel and maybe keep their thoughts about how this is for the best to themselves, Violets for Roses is about what happens after, when you come out of the fog of the breakup and remember there’s a world on the other side of it, a self you suppressed to make something work even though it was inevitably doomed. Ever since I fell out of love with you I fell back in love with the city. Ever since I fell out of love with you I fell back in love with the streets. That’s my girl! 

Ride

My friend and I used to listen to this all the time and scream I’m tired of feeling like I’m fucking crazy!!!!!!!!!!!!! at each other. Still bangs.

Sweet

I’ve been going to LA a lot lately; I’m contemplating moving there, the paradise New Yorkers go to right before they expire, like when you give a dog one last, beautiful day before you put them down. While lost in the Beverly Center parking lot one day I texted a friend “being here is like an immersive lana listening experience.” This one especially makes me feel her presence everywhere. I thought about it while hiking with my friend in Griffith Park. I thought about it while driving to Long Beach. I thought about it while walking down Genesee to get to my pilates class. If you want some basic bitch go to the Beverly Center and find her. That was me, the basic bitch who couldn’t find her car in the Beverly Center parking lot. 

Venice Bitch + Taco Truck x VB

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I couldn’t decide. When you listen to them together it’s a perfect diptych of a woman who is trying to be less crazy and simply cannot stop herself. Although it seems I’ve gotten better, I can be violent too. I also love when she gets kind of Latina with it. That’s why they call her Lanita…! Signing off bang bang kiss kiss <3

Honorable mentions: 

Dark But Just A Game (life is sweet but whatever baby!); Off to the Races; hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have; Text Book (absolutely psycho song that is kind of about how she wants to fuck her dad, but in a way that is more overt than songs about how she wants to fuck her daddy); West Coast

Gaby Del Valle is a writer from Florida. She is currently working on her first book, BLOOD AND SOIL, a history of the century-old relationship between conservation and eugenics.

Sydney Bauer

I spent way too much of my years in college arguing about Lana Del Rey online. I was going through it depression-wise and it was nice to see someone who was just as sad as I was, dropping banger after banger. Who cares if she was an industry plant with YouTube videos that were of a different persona? Her first SNL performance was terrible but that did not mean her music sucked. Or so I said over and over online at 2 am while studying abroad in Germany. Anyway, very few artists ever tell an interviewer they want to kill themselves, and for someone who struggles with constant passive suicidal ideation, that always stuck with me. Life sucks a lot of times! It’s even worse when your brain is like “cool, so why don’t you kill yourself?” anytime something goes mildly wrong. Sometimes you just want to listen to someone sing about how that feels while floating through life while everyone around them has any sort of idea what that struggle is like. 

5. Cola

Few songs on earth have a first line that goes as hard as “My pussy tastes like Pepsi cola / My eyes are wide like cherry pie.” I workout to this song which probably says more about me than Lana Del Rey. Born to Die is one of those albums that was kind of uneven when it came out (A side all bangers, back half not so much) but has aged really well. The extra tracks really made the album that much better back then, and still are so great. 

4. Heroin

The back half of Lust for Life, to me, has always been one of the strongest sections of Lana’s catalogue and I think one of the most under-appreciated. She overshadows Stevie Nicks on it! The final three songs always stood out to me in terms of quality and the sadness in the lyrics. I never had close friends who struggled with hard drugs, but have known plenty of friends of friends who’ve struggled and some who have even died. “I’m thinking to the moon again dreaming about heroin / and how it gave you everything and took your life away.” Not much else to say. That about sums it up. 

3. Off to the Races

Overshadowed by the release of Blue Jeans and Born to Die, this was always my favorite single before Lana’s debut came out. The song showcased her range as a singer and the lyrics are just so immersed in this world of lust for the worst people on earth. I was working as a media volunteer for the world junior ice hockey championships when this song came out so I had willingly exiled myself to Calgary, Alberta alone in a hotel room for three weeks in the dead of winter. That night I went out and bought a 12 pack of beer (a novelty for a 20 year old), drank them all, listened to nothing but this track on repeat and eventually ended up throwing up. I think if Lana read this she’d approve. 

2. Venice Bitch 

Norman Fucking Rockwell to me will always be the album that defines the first Trump administration music-wise. It’s the seminal album of that time from 2017-2021. Dropping a 9:37 length track as a single in the run up was a ballsy move, but the track is so good that it was worth it. Musically it is is kind of a departure, but it never feels like an almost 10 minute long track, which is an accomplishment itself. 

1. Blue Jeans

I don’t think a lot of people really understand how much this song BLEW up on music blogs in a time where there was such a vibrant ecosystem of people passing around tracks and writing about them. It was a time when Spotify was invite code only, so to find new music word of mouth was the key. Blogs would put together monthly mixtapes of free tracks that were designed to help get artists’ names out there in a period of optimism again after the 2008 financial crash, just a few years removed from the hell that was the Bush administration. Plus, what 19 year old doesn’t hear the line “I will love you till the end of time. I would wait a million years” and not think about some person they met once at a party and envision a full robust life together? Couldn’t be me. I really should have realized I was a giant lesbian then, but I had to wait like eight more years to sort out my gender issues. This song changed how we talk about music online and for that it’ll be number one for me always. 

Sydney Bauer is a trans freelance journalist based in Jersey. She was a Springsteen obsessive long before she did any sort of sports writing. 

Luke O’Neil

I have written about Lana so many times over the years. There was a period when you were legally required under the bylaws of internet culture writing to cover her every move. I just went back to try to look up some of the older pieces to refresh my memory of what I thought about the music at the time but the thing is so many of the publications those reviews appeared in  – Vice, MTV News, Alternative Press, Bullett, the Boston Phoenix, and my own old blog to name a few – no longer exist. I couldn’t access the memories if I wanted to. 

While that is annoying on a “the state of media” level I do appreciate the thematic resonance of it. A past that I no longer have access to. One that I’m maybe misremembering anyway. 

Things were so much better back then weren’t they? 

Weren’t they?

I was never a particularly young person at the same time the music of Lana Del Rey also existed in the world but I was in fact so much younger then. Old enough to understand what she was trying to do with the gag but still young enough to fall for it head over heels anyway. To believe in the unbelievability of it. To still think carrying on like that about every heartbreak wasn’t just permissible behavior but actually admirable. 

My god I can still vividly remember the six months or so when the videos for Video Games and Blue Jeans dropped in 2011. Remembering the first time I saw a music video for a specific song isn’t something that I really have enough of a spark left in my soul to do or the mental bandwidth to carry around with me anymore. But these two hit me like, I don’t know, fucking Welcome to the Jungle and Madonna’s Express Yourself when I was boy. Is that an exaggeration? I don’t know! Don’t care really either. 

Wait I found a few of my pieces. Here’s one from 2014 in Dazed when I was mad Young and Beautiful was snubbed for an Oscar nomination. 

It's not only the best song from a movie of the year, it's one of the year's best songs period. When you add in the way it perfectly encapsulates the tragic romance at the heart of the story, the longing, the slipping away of youth, it seems like a no-brainer. Then again, considering her every move is pulled from the iconography of Hollywood's grand old golden years, an Oscar nod probably would've made Lana really happy, and a happy Lana is bad for her creative process.

Here’s one from 2019 in The Observer about the time everyone was rightfully pissed off that she was going to play in Israel and the hasbara astroturf campaign they set up to push back against it.

“There’s a war underway for the soul of Lana Del Rey, and this time it’s not between two 37-year-old bikers with face tattoos.”

There was always something a little arch and shit-eating about the way me and a lot of other men wrote about Lana. Probably too much poisoning from the Hipster Runoff era around her emergence. Maybe I was always too horned up to think straight. Or maybe it was just good old fashioned misogyny. 

Then again I recognize the exact impulse I have to embrace her and push her away that I also feel for Morrissey – finally a Morrissey for girls! I used to joke – because there is something about the melodrama on offer in both of their music that rides the corny/tragic line so deftly it can at times feel uncanny. 

Also transcendant.

They're both very funny too to be clear. I'm not sure Lana gets enough credit for that aspect of her work.

I also just found this from 2018 in Esquire about Radiohead suing her over the alleged similarities between Creep and Get Free. 

Are the songs actually all that similar?

Very much so, says Bonnie Hayes, chair of the songwriting department at Berklee College of Music. “The two main sections are identical.” While Radiohead’s “Creep” (in the key of G) is essentially the same chords throughout the entire song, a significant part of Del Rey’s (in the key of B flat) mimics that progression.

It’s not just the chord progression, which isn’t technically subject to copyright, that evokes similarities here however. It’s the relative uniqueness of the type of deviation from the norm that causes the similarities to the ear. Without getting too technical, two chords in each song are ones that aren’t typically found within the key. In Radiohead’s case, that’s a b7 and a c minor.

“Those two chords are so distinctive,” Hayes says. “Most of the songs on the radio stay within the diatonic, a major scale, and aren’t very adventurous in going out of the key. When you use these chords that leave the key you get a real identifiable sonic fingerprint. When you hear it in a pop song it’s so distinctive you connect it to another song.”

Del Rey’s song does the same thing. It’s what gives both songs their emotional resonance and sense of alienation. Essentially, Hayes says, it’s two chords that “don’t belong here.”

That kind of chord is really crucial to her entire catalog. Her entire persona. I don’t belong here. Something has gone wrong and I do not belong here. Maybe dreaming my circumstances are something different than they actually are will make it all feel better?

And here’s something I wrote in Hell World about her in 2022 around the tenth anniversary of Born to Die. 

The bag on Lana when she emerged with Blue Jeans and Video Games, which were rightfully received as captivating and brain-breaking for a lot of us at the time, was that she was an industry plant, whatever that means, and therefore bullshit and inauthentic. Maybe so! But goddamn did the marketing guys just absolutely knock it out of the park with that one. Coke and McDonalds or whoever could never. Hers was an almost immediately and entirely realized world-build that rewrote culture in a similar way that Tarantino did I think. Pastiche and allusion to old Hollywood in a completely unique feeling way, but, and I feel dopey saying it like this, from a feminine perspective. Agency for the noir moll! Such an obvious concept they had to invent it. Either way, her music, her “whole thing” wouldn’t have landed as hard, or lasted as long as it has, if the songs and performance weren’t just really, really good, which they were then and remain today. 

I believe I believe all of that still. The last part especially. 

Lana is an odd case in that I feel like she’s the rare artist where it’s actually not as cool to like her early work the best but that’s what I’m going to do here. I could pick songs from most of the albums if I wanted to but I don’t. That first side of Born to Die is unimpeachable. 

Born to Die
Young and Beautiful
National Anthem
Blue Jeans
Video Games

Luke O’Neil runs Welcome to Hell World – this newsletter! His most recent book A Creature Wanting Form is good. His next one We Had It Coming will be available soon.

Sean T. Collins (47) and H. Ferguson-Collins (14)

SEAN: You and I come to Lana Del Rey from very different directions. I’ve been around for her whole career, starting back during the Obama era, whereas you’ve started listening at a time when she already has a pretty substantial discography. Back then it seemed you needed to generate a capital-O Opinion on her work, which is annoying, so I’ve only ever really dabbled in her stuff here and there. 

H.: Yeah, Lana del Rey is a very popular artist that, to be honest, I sort of dismissed. The whole Lana aesthetic has become very popular among girls my age and older. I was really forced to listen to it at residential. [Dad Note: H. spent several months in a residential treatment facility due to a newly diagnosed eating disorder called ARFID.] That was the peak demographic for her: mentally ill teenage white girls that may or may not be guilty of sometimes romanticizing their suffering. But I was forced to admit, her music is pretty good. I can see why it’s popular.

SEAN: So how do you wanna go through these?

H.: Not in order of preference. That’s too hard.

SEAN: Let’s do it alphabetically.

A&W

SEAN: The origin story for my relationship with this song, which was pretty obsessive in the summer of 2023, is that a buddy of mine performed it at karaoke when I’d never heard it before. Melodically it was already very strong, and it has that great piano line, but when the beat started kicking in? That’s when I was like “Well well well, what have we here?”

H.: Yeah, I like that it’s a song with multiple parts. 

SEAN: You and I have spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles so it doesn’t surprise me that songs that evolve appeal to you. Or trippier songs.

H.: Right. My favorite Beatles song is It’s All Too Much. I’m a psychedelic Beatles guy.

SEAN: I think that’s why this one’s my favorite. She goes further out than I’ve heard her go before.

Dealer 

H.: Many Lana songs are sad, but this is the only one that comes to mind as being truly angry — screamingly so.

SEAN: That comes as such a huge surprise if you’ve heard, like, anything else she’s ever sung. All of a sudden she’s really going for it!

H.: The duet is very unexpected too. Since there’s no feature listed, it’s a shock to hear his voice. I thought that the male vocals were a sample of an old song sung by a woman or something, but I was wrong.

SEAN: I really enjoy how bottomed-out and exhausted they both sound. With the music too, you get a sense that this relationship is kind of collapsing at the finish line. And it’s in a great tradition of duets that are basically arguments, which is a fun little subgenre: Sometimes Always,  Don’t You Want Me, Nothing Better,  Tramp. I’d say this is my second favorite after A&W.

H.: I think this one’s my favorite. 

National Anthem

H.: Because you can’t have Lana without Americana. This song is why teenage girls on TikTok are like, “How do I wear the American flag in a Lana way and not a MAGA way?”

SEAN: I wonder if that’s even possible nowadays. This song and its whole vibe definitely hit different now than they did during Obama, that’s for sure. You know, with a lot of the guys she sings about, especially in the early songs…like, you get the impression that these men probably hit her, and that maybe she’s not as not-okay with that as she should be.

H.: Yeah. She helped popularize a trash aesthetic. 

SEAN: But there’s also that whole Kennedy thing she’s got going on in the video, speaking of things that sound differently now than they did then.

H.: She does?

SEAN: Yeah, she does this whole thing with A$AP Rocky where he’s like JFK and she’s like Jackie. They go boating, they have a picnic, it’s very all-American. Then he gets assassinated, which is also very all-American.

H.: I figured. I should check it out.

Off to the Races

SEAN: This isn’t one I’d heard a lot before, and it’s funny to hear how much more polished and R&B her work sounded at first. These days it sounds like she mostly records in a decrepit mansion on a haunted piano.

H.: But this still sounds very ominous and off-beat to me. It’s very sinister and villainous. More songs should sound like that.

SEAN: Fully agreed. It also reminds me simultaneously of show tunes, like maybe some Kander & Ebb stuff, and ’90s Madonna, somehow. Like I could hear something similar to this on Erotica.

H.: I can kind of hear the Madonna comparison, even if just vibes-wise. 

Violets for Roses 

SEAN: This one, by contrast, sounds totally different to me. 

H.: Yes. You could see this song being sung by a ’70s singer-songwriter, just in a different tone. I think you especially feel that with the whole bit that goes, “God knows that the only mistake a man can make is tryna make a woman change and trade her violets for roses.”

SEAN: That’s exactly what I was thinking! That specific line, and the bit about men trying to make women change. The melodic phrasing is also very Fiona Apple, too, though I don’t know if you’ve heard much of her stuff.

H.: The line about “running round in summer dresses with their masks off” – I was like, “This song must have come out after 2020.” I just looked it up: This song came out in 2021, so it was definitely peak for “masks off.”

SEAN: Yeah, I’ll say, that little window after the vaccines but before it became apparent it was gonna keep mutating into new very bad strains. It’s pretty poignant to hear now.

H.: The interesting thing about this song is it’s a breakup song, but not a sad one. Like, she’s not mad at it. She’s glad it’s over. 

SEAN: A kiss-off song, right. By the way, along with Dealer and A&W, this was one of the songs you knew from the jump you wanted us to talk about.

H.: Yeah. I think it’s very me-coded.

Sean T. Collins is a writer and critic. H. Ferguson-Collins is a writer and eighth-grade student. They live with the rest of their family on Long Island.