Without intending to, that album became one of the main catalysts for pop’s mid-2010s shift from brash EDM to a moodier, hip-hop-inflected palette. Born to Die has stayed on the Billboard 200 albums chart for almost a full decade, the second-longest charting album by a female solo artist in history. Through all the controversies, Lana’s artistry has endured. Her most creatively unburdened album, Chemtrails felt instantly timeless - cementing her place in the modern canon alongside her Laurel Canyon idols, the likes of Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. March’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club was the opposite of radical, but served a crucial purpose in reconnecting Del Rey with her roots as a singer-songwriter in the American tradition.

Lana Del Rey: Photos From the Billboard Cover Shoot The critically beloved Norman Fucking Rockwell, from 2019, was her most complete reinvention yet, turning her into a folk-rock troubadour who’d never seemed more human. On 2017’s Lust For Life, Lana rebooted her image once again, adopting an optimistic, Woodstock-inspired outlook for our uncertain age. 2015’s Honeymoon indulged in jazz and soul, opening herself back up to the possibility of happiness. And then, with her 2014 sophomore LP Ultraviolence, she burned it all down, trading the hip-hop beats for fiery psych-rock guitars, on songs where she had no interest in coming off as sympathetic. In 2013, “Young and Beautiful,” her theme from Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, and the Cedric Gervais remix of “Summertime Sadness” made Del Rey a reliable hitmaker, and a household name. The Paradise EP and her epic “Ride” video soon followed, expanding on Born to Die’s themes of romantic fatalism, while galvanizing an emerging cult fanbase that hung on her every word. “Lana Del Rey” became an instantly identifiable aesthetic, the same way the likes of David Lynch, Mad Men, Margaret Keane, or Amy Winehouse had before her. Del Rey took the girl-group, Nancy Sinatra pop stylings of the ’60s, and fused it with modern cinematic production and a glamorous, Hollywood-inspired image, to create a kind of hyper-real 21st century Americana. Lana Del Rey on Finding Her Voice and Following Her Muse: 'I Have Never Taken a Shortcut'īorn to Die, her 2012 major-label debut, arrived with impossibly high levels of both hype and trepidation, to decidedly mixed initial reactions.

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