Several times postponed, the seventh album of Lana Del Rey, subtle and nostalgic, confirms her place in the firmament of Folk.
More prolific than ever, Lana Del Rey releases a new album, the seventh in her eleven-year career, just two years after her critically acclaimed “Norman Fucking Rockwell! “and only one year after her spoken word album, “Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass”. It is produced, like “Norman”, by Jack Antonoff, collaborator of Taylor Swift or Lorde, and digs even deeper the way of minimalism which had succeeded so well. But if the piano was at the center of most of the tracks of the previous opus, here it is the guitars, the tambourine and some very seventies folk strings that take the lion’s share. The whole, magnificent and delicately orchestrated, gives to “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” an atmosphere of enchanted parenthesis, of graceful melancholy bubble, of troubling mirage. If the first single was pure Lana Del Rey, with its nostalgia loaded with American dream, we have the impression of rediscovering her in “Wanderlust”, “Yosemite”, “Breaking Up Slowly” or “Dance Till We Die”, ballads simply dressed with caressing guitars, discreet percussions and her evanescent voice that has never been so overwhelming. The glamorous diva reveals herself as an outstanding songwriter and concludes her album with a heartbreaking cover of Joni Mitchell’s “For Free”. Lana forever.