It’s hard now to imagine just how surprising it was when Morrissey moved to Los Angeles from Dublin in 1996. “A superficial, willfully kitsch city of bronzed, rock-hard torsos, swimming pools, big cars, Hollywood stars, and gangsta rappers,” one British newspaper wrote, “it hardly seems suited to the needs of a bashful, bookish, rapier-witted, and quintessentially English artiste.” But vanish into La La Land he did, living in a Mediterranean-style Hollywood Hills mansion built by Clark Gable and later owned by F. Scott Fitzgerald. When Moz released 2004’s sparkling You Are the Quarry, he was interviewed poolside in Beverly Hills, if you can believe it.

A Los Angeles transplant seemingly more at home with swimming pools, big cars, and Hollywood stars, New York’s Lana Del Rey shares more than just a change of scenery with the Smiths icon. It’s there in the melancholia, the vintage trappings, and the fervent cults of personality, stoked by provocation. It’s there in the embrace of style as a means for substance: she can be Brit lit; he can be meta. As NPR’s Ken Tucker once put it, “She is Morrissey with a better pout.”

Five years ago, a clip called “This Charming Video Game” made the rounds online. The mashup between Del Rey’s 2011 YouTube hit “Video Games” and the Smiths’ 1983 jangle-pop classic “This Charming Man” wasn’t exactly “A Stroke of Genie-us,” but conceptually, it was something close. Not that their shared aestheticization of sadness was as clear then, with the early hype and subsequent backlash around Del Rey’s so-called inauthenticity dominating the conversation. Lana’s challenge was to prove that her world-building held deliberate meaning for her as a glamorous avatar of gloom. Morrissey had almost the opposite problem when the Smiths emerged as sullen heroes. Although the floppy-haired frontman had no medical need for those oversized National Health Service eyeglasses, his misfit, clumsy-and-shy presentation was widely treated as totally sincere, when campy exaltation has been part of Moz’s sensibility all along. Unlike classic rockers, with their boozy machismo and blustering self-seriousness, Moz knew the importance of not being earnest sometimes. And unlike some of the gaudier UK pop acts of the time, he reveled in ambiguity: Is it real?

With time, Del Rey’s musical similarities to Morrissey have grown clearer. No, the trip-hop gauze and hip-hop boom-bap of 2012’s Born to Die didn’t recall Johnny Marr’s intricate Smiths guitar lines. But Lana’s sonic touchstones on 2014’s Ultraviolence—’60s girl groups like the Crystals, pre-rock singers like Shirley Bassey, Roy Orbison-style torch crooning, outsized Ennio Morricone schmaltz—fell very much in line with Morrissey’s own. The Smiths were born of girl-group music, after all—Marr and Moz initially bonded over a Marvelettes B-side—and Morrissey worked with the aforementioned film-score legend Morricone on the not-un-Lana-like solo ballad “Dear God, Please Help Me.” It isn’t really so strange to go from Lana’s “Sad Girl” to the Smiths’ “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” from “Money Power Glory” to Moz’s “All You Need Is Me.” They emote, they boast, they turn tracklistings into cheeky works of art. She’s besotted with bad boys (and James Dean); he’s drawn to sweet and tender hooligans, tough guys, and thugs (and James Dean). To die by a lover’s side—whether on “Summertime Sadness” or “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”—would be a heavenly way to die.

Del Rey’s 2015 album, Honeymoon, only heightened her likeness to Morrissey. Its opulent orchestration spotlit her expressive crooning and wryly self-absorbed turns of phrase; surely Morrissey would eventually have thought to open a record with, “We both know/That it’s not fashionable to love me,” if she hadn’t done it first. The album’s old-world flavor—in the Italian lyrics and Godfather orchestration of “Salvatore,” or the Latin percussion of “24”—actually aligned with the flamenco guitar and European scenery of Moz’s latest, 2014’s World Peace Is None of Your Business. And when, on the jazz-infused “Art Deco,” she deployed the loaded slang “so ghetto,” she highlighted yet another, less comfortable of point of commonality between the two.