Lana Del Rey is a colorful study in contrasts: She’s a quintessentially West Coast presence who spent her formative years in Lake Placid, a Catholic-school kid who blossomed into a songwriter with a flair for the salacious and the macabre, and a pop star whose work evokes not sunny seaside shindigs but harrowing, deadening inertia. Lana is not your chipper, reserved celebrity, either — the kind whose gift for avoiding controversy and unpleasantness should be studied in a lab. In December, she shared photos of a billboard announcing her ninth album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, on her private Instagram account. “There’s only one and it’s in Tulsa,” the caption explained. Her ex, police officer Sean Larkin, lives there. But Ocean Blvd isn’t a breakup record. It’s about healing, opening a new chapter in the oeuvre of an artist who fixates on troubles hiding in plain sight, and the fears and sorrows swirling behind our public masks of contentment. Where past releases pulled you into a world of cinematic ennui and seedy Americana, offering the thrill of a sightseeing tour of Hollywood horrors, this one pierces the enshrouding darkness, seeking solace from pain through companionship and spirituality.
