Two years after Lust for Life, Lana Del Rey is back with Norman Fucking Rockwell!, her most unbridled and lyrically rich effort to date.
Del Rey’s sixth album sees the songstress cast off the shallow “sad girl” meme of records past and confront the scary, stark reality of life and love before her. Armed with little more than a piano and a pen, NFR! Is an acerbic oral history of the morass of melancholy sinking the modern age — and we can’t get enough. There are countless examples throughout the new LP that illustrate this, but here are our 10 times it felt like Lana Del Rey was definitely reading our minds.
(Buy: Tickets to Upcoming Lana Del Rey Concerts)
Lyric: “Why wait for the best when I could have you?”
Song: “Norman Fucking Rockwell”
Why We Love It: Straight out of the gate, Lana takes no prisoners. Most of us know the wretched pain of settling. Few of us are brave enough to put it to song.
Lyric: “Fear fun, fear love/ Fresh out of fucks forever”
Song: “Venice Bitch”
Why We Love It: If we could package our 2019 #mood into a single lyric, this would be it. What is there to do when the wold is spinning a little too quickly? Say “f*ck it,” of course.
Lyric: “There’s things I wanna say to you/ But I’ll just let you live/ Like if you hold me without hurting me/ You’ll be the first who ever did”
Song: “Cinnamon Girl”
Why We Love It: This one goes out to everyone who has ever typed their heart and soul into a text message, only to hover over “send” for a full minute before deleting the damn thing in its entirety. This one goes out to all of us.
Lyric: “If he’s a serial killer, then what’s the worst/ That can happen to a girl who’s already hurt?/ I’m already hurt”
Song: “Happiness Is a Butterfly”
Why We Love It: Just when you think you’ve heard every phrase related to emotional pain, specifically being on the receiving end of it, Del Rey draws on the anatomical to posit: Heartache, in many ways, registers far, far beyond death.
Lyric in a GIF:
Lyric: “I’ve been tearing around in my fucking nightgown/ 24-7 Sylvia Plath/ Writing in blood on your walls/ ‘Cause the ink in my pen don’t look good in my pad”
Song: “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but i have it”
Why We Love It: How does one cut through the noise to grab the attention of the world, or a lover, when words on the page don’t seem satisfactory? Bleed it out and blow sh*t up.
Click ahead for more spot-on Lana-isms.
