With her ninth studio effort, Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd, Lana Del Rey formally submits her entry to be gilded into the narrative of the American songbook. She hasn’t already proven herself capable of such fetes in the past, but with her 2019 through 2021 run of Norman Fucking Rockwell, Chem Trails over the Country Club and Blue Banisters, the beginning of her creative era with Jack Antonoff imbued a psychedelic grip over the culture as her style put her edges front and forward. They’re still apparent here in plenty of horny, drug-addled cursory innuendo to be heard stemming from the songwriter’s tongue, but compositionally across the the album’s 16-track, 77-minute long journey into the Del Rey Americana gaze, she, Antonoff alongside producers Drew Erickson, Zach Dawes, Mike Hermosa, and Benji wonder what a Lana Del Rey album would sound like if her fashion for forward pop did not need to exist mutually away from the standards. Their collective creative pursuits present a more realized interpretation of Del Rey’s songs than what 2015’s Honeymoon attempted in its classicist frame of her, finding ways to bridge a soft, muted orchestration into glitched wormholes and tranquilizing vibeouts which compliment the more profane Lana-isms heard bluntly on the lyrical surface. Every generation’s chapter written into a timeless American songbook has its master pens and defining voices, and Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd affirms an expletive exclamation mark for Lana Del Rey as that of now, to live on forever.

Highlights: “Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd”, “A&W”, “Paris, Texas”

Lana Del Rey’s Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd is available now on Interscope / Polydor Records.

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