The notion of not-altogether-fun slippage between generations seems more of an obsession than ever for Del Rey on her fourth album, Lust for Life. The title is an Iggy Pop rip, one of many blatantly referential turns of phrase on the album. In the stories her songs tell, time travel nearly seems real: a moment at 2017 Coachella can become “Woodstock in my mind,” leading her to interpolate “Stairway to Heaven” and contemplate nuclear apocalypse. She begins the album sighing about “you kids with your vintage music,” adding, “You’re part of the past, but now you’re the future / Signals crossing can get confusing.” She’s awed by the cultural history that mass media marinates today’s youth in—but she’s also unsettled by it.

Del Rey’s music itself has always been retro-minded. In 2011, something about the way she sang sounded foreign compared to the try-hard emoting of Lady Gaga or Adele, and the description she often received was “dead eyed.” Really her shtick was semi-parodic throwback that swirled together B-movie blankness, girl-group earnestness, and Laurel Canyon introspection. Yet the way she married that sensibility with dramatic orchestration and snaking machine rhythms for her debut, Born to Die, was new, establishing a template for radio that still prevails today. Her two follow-ups, Ultraviolence and Honeymoon, were gauzier, slower experiments in rock and cabaret, but Lust for Life is really Born to Die’s sequel: a rather fabulous return to catchiness, camp, and faint hip-hop influences. She’s ever-more-cleverly casting the present in terms of the past and vice versa—and this time, there’s a political reason why.

Working primarily with her longtime collaborator Rick Nowels, Del Rey seems here to feel that “formulaic” is no insult when you’ve got fascinating variables to put into the formula. Most songs begin with Del Rey crooning alone over reverberating piano, guitar, or queasy synthetic bass. But by the chorus, it’s kicked into a rose-petal storm: loping programmed drums, lancing strings, Del Rey gasping across octaves without losing her cool. Often it feels like Nowels is backing into the sound of the Sneaker Pimps, and some of these 16 tracks were likely included only because Del Rey wrote lines that were too outrageous not to share. “Could it be that I fell for another loser?” she asks on one of a few second-tier cuts early in the album. “I’m crying while I’m cumin’ / Making love while I’m making good money.”

Such depictions of mercenary, doomed love affairs have long been Del Rey’s specialty, rooted in her nostalgia aesthetic. Born to Die reveled in pre-feminist relationship ideals: sugar daddies and Lolitas, guys loafing and girls doting on them. The level of irony at which she was operating wasn’t clear at the time, just as it’s now not clear just how earnestly she’s indulging a related set of Boomer tropes: flower-child positivity, dancing one’s way to peace, youth as paradise, the noble groupie. The power of her music may well be in the unease of her reclamation—the way that her voice, if not always her words, suggests certain problems can’t actually be banished by love and drugs and music.