This search leads her down musical paths as distinct and varied as the country of which she sings. In Chemtrails, Del Rey leans into her songwriting capabilities more than ever before, canvassing the Great American Song Book in search of a fitting voice with which to spin her tales of boredom and sadness, melancholy and solipsism. But Del Rey is clever enough to know not to spend all of her songwriting capital on the brazenly histrionic and fatalistic musical montages found ubiquitously throughout the early part of her career. There is still a fair share of self-indulgence found throughout the record. This doesn’t mean that Lana entirely abandons her satirical and cinematic story-telling, however, or that she foregoes any of the now-expected and familiar instances of swelling melodies and crescendoing faux-orchestral accompaniments. Replete with self-amusing and referential witticisms as evidenced by the album’s title, Chemtrails marks a departure from the glossy and overtly-theatrical baroque sensibilities that put the singer on the map nearly a decade ago.
An ambitious eleven-song corpus clocking in at forty-five-minutes long, Chemtrails finds the reigning queen of neo-surrealist Americana expanding on her kitsch-driven and pop-culture-saturated vision of her native land during a year marked by a global pandemic and the unraveling of the failed Trump presidency.īuilding on the stylistic and aesthetic motifs of its predecessor, 2019’s cultural juggernaut Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Chemtrails over the Country Club is the latest over-articulated attempt by Del Rey to expound on the cultural decadence and malaise that have become standard features in the post-industrial and post-ironic age. Nearly six months after its initially-scheduled release, Chemtrails over the Country Club, Lana Del Rey’s seventh studio album was released last Friday, March 19th, on Interscope and Polydor Records.
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