9/10 Daoud 30 August 2019

Lana Del Rey has forged a career from writing the same song again and again and again. ‘Video Games’ is ‘Young and Beautiful’ is ‘Love’ is everything on sixth album ‘Norman (that’s us!) Fucking Rockwell’. And to be fair, it’s a very good song. It’s a song that luxuriates in its misery, that centres Del Rey’s wistful and ghostly vocals, that’s dressed up in production that sounds like a vague dream about the golden years of Hollywood. Sometimes I love this song, as on the above tracks, and sometimes I don’t. But until now, I’ve never loved an album’s worth of them.

‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’ sounds content in a way previous records haven’t. Sonically it’s much more cohesive, and much less overproduced, which suits that atmosphere of aged glamour. For the most part, the songs feature just Del Rey and a piano. This suits the songs, which are all incredibly vulnerable. Consider the title track’s emotional crux, “Why wait for the best when I could have you?” That’s not the sort of sentiment that suits being obscured by midi harps.

The only bit of excess is the album’s ten minute long ‘Venice Bitch’. What starts as a woozy ballad ends with a proggy solo and Del Rey invoking Tommy James and the Shondells’ classic ‘Crimson and Clover’. I’m not the type of person who goes in for extended psychedelic outros, but here it works. Little says forgotten glamour like a superfluous solo, like a rock band no one remembers.

I couldn’t tell you why this album has resonated with me in a way that others haven’t. Those differences I’ve picked out are meaningful, but they don’t change anything fundamental. But the album does resonate and it’s beautiful and moving and sad and joyful. We listened to ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell’ in the office together and it felt weird, my relationship to this album is personal to the point that I don’t even understand it. And that is something very special indeed.