When Lana Del Rey dropped “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” earlier this year, it felt like a natural yet unexpected conclusion. This eerie, Southern Gothic love song, reminiscent of Shelley Duvall in Popeye (1980), crossed with the hushed, femme-fatale lo-fi of her Lizzy Grant days, feels stitched together from pieces of Del Rey’s back catalog. The track is one of many teasing her hotly anticipated and long-delayed ninth album, Stove.
Lana Del Rey has soundtracked my summers for about as long as she’s been making music under that name. As we wait for the release of Stove, there’s plenty from the gangster Nancy Sinatra-turned-24/7 Sylvia Plath to keep us company. Here is our ranking of every Lana Del Rey album.
8. Honeymoon (2015)
I maintain that Lana Del Rey has never made a bad album, but something had to come in last place. Though I find myself reaching for Honeymoon the least, there are certain songs in this formidable collection of travelogues that stand out as career highlights: the illusion-shattering breakup ballad “The Blackest Day,” the earworm “High By The Beach,” and her Manson Girl cosplay on “Freak.” My personal favorite is “Music To Watch Boys To,” where she’s as mesmerizing as she is mesmerized.
7. Chemtrails Over the Country Club (2021)
After pseudo-eulogizing the nation that inspired her, Del Rey ran for the Heartland. On Chemtrails, her flirtations with folk and Americana are central. It’s the opener that stands out most: “White Dress” is a look back at pre-fame Lana Del Rey, the nobody who felt like a God.
6. Blue Banisters (2021)
Blue Banisters was billed as a back-to-basics record, its songs suited for front-facing iPhone cameras and bedroom dance parties of one. It’s warts-and-all Lana Del Rey, stumbling through a direct address, startlingly human.
5. Born To Die (2012)
No one cared who Lizzy Grant was until she put on the mask. The acclaim and infamy came in tandem. To me, her songs about traipsing around Coney Island and cruising to the Hamptons with her gangster boyfriends felt like a peek into an alternate reality. It was through the artifice that Del Rey would find her way back to the truth.
4. Ultraviolence (2014)
If Born To Die was an entryway into Del Rey’s nostalgic world, then Ultraviolence expanded it from the grainy digital camcorder to the silver screen. Dan Auerbach’s production is the secret sauce that brings it all together, creating tidal-wave guitars that ripple through “Shades of Cool” and “West Coast.”
3. Lust For Life (2017)
“Look at you kids with your vintage music,” is the line that opens Del Rey’s fourth album. In her attempts to understand and narrate the present, her instinct has always been to reach back into the past. It’s the moments of timelessness that are the most enduring.
2. Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd? (2023)
Its deep dive into Del Rey’s personal and familial history is accompanied by some of her boldest instrumentation and production. The Lana Del Rey we encounter on Ocean Blvd is standing at a crossroads, wondering how much stock to put in the public perception of herself. It’s deep within her own contradictions where she’s most compelling.
1. Norman Fucking Rockwell! (2019)
Lana Del Rey dropped her magnum opus during the dog-tail days of summer in 2019. NFR! is a love-hate letter to America as much as it is one to a “self-loathing poet, resident Laurel Canyon know-it-all.” When she invites the listener to “take my hand” on the towering “Mariners Apartment Complex,” you have no choice but to believe that she’s capable of anything.
