The title Norman Fucking Rockwell! first came to Lana Del Rey as both a joke and a revelation. “It was kind of an exclamation mark: so this is the American dream, right now,” she told Vanity Fair earlier this year. “This is where we’re at—Norman fucking Rockwell. We’re going to go to Mars, and Trump is president, all right.”
This surreal mix of myth and reality, nostalgic visions of the past and grave warnings for the near future, total chaos and California coolness, defines the 14 songs on her fifth full-length. The album weaves love songs for self-destructive poets, psychedelic jam sessions, and even a cover of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time” through arrangements that harken back to the Laurel Canyon pop of the ’60s and ’70s. Throughout, Lana has never sounded more in tune to her own muse—or less interested in appealing to the masses. Here’s what you need to know about the album.
Writing in Real Time
The rollout for Norman Fucking Rockwell! kicked off just under a year ago, with the release of “Mariners Apartment Complex” and “Venice Bitch.” Lana followed those songs with a long, casual stream of snippets and teases on social media, occasionally sharing a full song like “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but i have it” along the way. She called these releases “fan tracks,” and they felt like periodic transmissions from an artist at work, excitedly sharing her progress. Even the accompanying artwork was spontaneous: blurry iPhone photos that felt a million miles away from her cinematic videos and glamorous album covers.
This of-the-moment approach to songwriting is a constant throughout the new album. The coda to “The greatest” references wildfires in Los Angeles and Kanye’s devolution in the public eye, while “hope is a dangerous thing” approaches her own mythology from various shifting perspectives. The spontaneity gives her lyrics a newfound directness, as if she’s tapping into her life—and the world around her—as it happens.
Lana, Unfiltered
Lana’s last album, 2017’s Lust for Life, was her most crowded affair, with appearances from the Weeknd, A$AP Rocky, Playboi Carti, Stevie Nicks, and Sean Ono Lennon. NFR! takes the opposite approach, focusing the vocal spotlight exclusively on its star. Lana did get some help behind the scenes, though.
Her most prominent collaborator on the album is superproducer Jack Antonoff, who serves as a one-man house band, accompanying on drums, piano, guitar, synths, and whatever else a given song calls for. Lana told Billboard that she was skeptical of teaming up with such an in-demand name at first. But after the pair hammered through the sparse highlight “Love Song” together, they continued following the spark. The larger-than-life, synth-pumping sound Antonoff has established through his work with the likes of Lorde and Taylor Swift is nowhere to be found; he’s clearly in her world here, rather than the other way around.
Also contributing to the record is multi-instrumentalist Zach Dawes of the retro rock band Mini Mansions. Dawes, whose resume includes playing bass on records by Brian Wilson and Lisa Marie Presley, also appeared on Arctic Monkeys’ 2018 LP Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, and he helps transport that album’s burned-out space lounge vibe to Lana’s beachside ruminations. Additionally, her longtime songwriting partner Rick Nowles appears only sparingly on NFR!, lending his touch to just three songs on the album’s second half: “Next Best American Record,” “Bartender,” and “Happiness Is a Butterfly.”
With such a small group of collaborators, the sound of the record is entirely Lana’s own, with an emphasis on piano and vocals. In her catalog, it most closely resembles her earthy sophomore album Ultraviolence, but with its muted sense of ’70s gloom switched out for a more colorful approach. Even NFR!’s quietest moments, like its title track, cast a heavenly glow, bringing her lyrics to life in new ways.
The Lana Del Rey Songbook
Like the classic rock artists that inspire her, Lana has cultivated a body of work full of interconnected ideas that add depth and intrigue to her shadowy creative universe. From recurring characters like Billy to familiar imagery of diamonds and top-shelf liquor, Lana scholars will find plenty to obsess over throughout these wordy, interconnected ballads. (There’s even a line in “The Next Best American Record”—“Topanga’s hot tonight”—that also appeared in Lust for Life’s “Heroin.”) And of course, her references to hall of fame heavies including Neil Young, the Eagles, the Stones, and Crosby Stills & Nash are as playful as ever.
A New Type of Sadness
Somewhere between 2015’s Honeymoon and 2017’s Lust for Life, Lana shifted her scope from winking self portraits to sweeping generational statements, and the visions throughout NFR! are full of apocalyptic urgency. “Don’t ask if I’m happy, you know that I’m not/But at best I can say I’m not sad,” she sings in “hope is a dangerous thing.” It calls back to a time in the not-so-distant past when her music seemed tethered to the one-dimensional pop culture conception of the “sad girl,” except now her malaise is situated in larger stories.
She longs for simpler times, and empathizes with tragic figures like Sublime’s Bradley Nowell, who was just 28 when he died of a heroin overdose in a San Francisco hotel, and the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson, who drowned in L.A.’s Marina del Rey harbor in 1983, at the age of 39. Both artists seem like fitting pillars for Lana’s constantly evolving mythological home of California, a place that once seemed like a dream and now feels nightmarish.
Unforgettable Lana-isms
“Goddamn man-child/You fucked me so good that I almost said ‘I love you’” (“Norman Fucking Rockwell”)
“If you hold me without hurting me/You’ll be the first who ever did” (“Cinnamon Girl”)
“The culture is lit, and I had a ball” (“The greatest”)
“All the ladies of the canyon/Wearing white for their tea parties/Playing games of levitation/Meditating in the garden” (“Bartender”)
“Hello, it’s the most famous woman you know on the iPad/Calling from beyond the grave, I just wanna say, ‘Hi, Dad’” (“hope is a dangerous thing”)