The most compelling moments on the album come when Del Rey and frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff choose to move outside their comfort zone. This benefits songs like “Chemtrails Over the Country Club,” which felt slight as a single, but spreads its ominous overcast across the entire record. Musically, her new album is a study in blurred boundaries, rather than being concrete or self–contained.
But when she sings, “If you love me, you’ll love me / 'Cause I’m wild, wild at heart,” the sentiment is elevated from lower back tattoo fodder to dissociative poetry. In her music, she’s “the poet laureate of a world on fire.” But in the harsh light of real life she can be, as Street’s Kyle Whiting puts it, “a bumbling fool.” Take an excerpt from her interview with Annie Mac earlier this year: “It’s like, we don’t know how to find the ways to be wild in our world … and at the same time, the world is so wild.” In reference to the seditionists who stormed the Capitol, this remark dangerously minimized the fact that the riots were foremost a hateful and violent demonstration of white supremacy.Ī similar sentiment crops up on “Wild At Heart,” midway through the tracklist of Del Rey’s seventh studio album Chemtrails Over the Country Club. It often feels as though Lana Del Rey lives in two different worlds.