September 2019 - Music

Album of the Month - Norman Rockwell by Lana Del Ray

Lana Del Rey's fifth album, 'Norman Rockwell!' contains multitudes. The way she balances and embodies them on this well-rounded record is nothing short of stunning

In Lana Del Rey’s Twitter bio you’ll find a quote from Walt Whitman’s 1892 poem Song Of Myself. It’s an unsurprising move for someone who’s spent much of the last decade carving out her niche as a 21st-century pop poet documenting, much like Whitman did, her own perspective of America

Overall, ‘Norman Rockwell!’ isn’t a surprising record – it’s a logical next step for Del Rey to take in a journey that’s seen her grow from hip-hop-flecked pop to bohemian folk. It would be easy for it to feel like Lana Del Rey-by-numbers but she avoids that trap by making something filled with beauty that subtly moves her sound on, ushering her into territory marked “timeless”. For anyone who thought her team-up with Jack Antonoff, a now omnipresent figure in big female pop records (Taylor Swift, Lorde) and this album’s producer, would mean the Bleachers frontman’s brand of crystalline euphoria being injected into the mix, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Everything here feels entirely Lana, exactly as you’d want.

That she veers from the ultra-modern to references to Sylvia Plath and photographer Slim Aarons, and from Laurel Canyon folk to trembling psych solos, on an album named after American author and illustrator Norman Rockwell only seem to prove the point she’s trying to make in her Twitter bio. 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.