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Every Lana Del Rey Album Ranked, from Lana Del Ray to Ocean Blvd

We’ve ranked all nine of the singer's albums, including her latest, Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.

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Lana Del Rey
Photo: Neil Krug

Lana Del Rey, née Elizabeth Grant, achieved cult fame even before her major label debut, Born to Die, hit shelves in 2012. Her road to iconic status, however, was long, winding, and filled with proverbial speed bumps, including an aborted indie album, released digitally in January of 2010 before being pulled three months later, and her infamous primetime debut on SNL, which prompted critics to hastily declare her shtick all hype and no substance.

Of course, Del Rey spent the next decade proving the naysayers shortsighted, culminating with 2019’s stunning Norman Fucking Rockwell. The singer followed up her magnum opus with not one but two new albums in 2021: Chemtrails Over the Country Club and the more stripped-down Blue Banisters, a sonic departure from its two predecessors.

Del Rey’s latest, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, reunites the artist with collaborator Jack Antonoff, who produced the majority of the album’s 16 tracks. To celebrate, we’ve ranked all nine of Del Rey’s studio albums, including the still out-of-print Lana Del Ray. Sal Cinquemani

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article was published on March 19, 2021.

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Honeymoon

9. Honeymoon (2015)

Del Rey’s third album, Honeymoon, concentrates not on the bliss of romantic escape, but rather, more predictably, on the comforts of time away dwelling in one’s solitary melancholy. In a sense, this is an extension of 2014’s Ultraviolence, where Del Rey’s (sometimes tongue-in-cheek) fetishization of her own preferred romantic—or anti-romantic—submissiveness became self-alienating. But where at least the specters of suitors pined for, or commiserated with, impressed themselves on that music, Honeymoon’s dramatically sparse arrangements suggest a gaping absence of any presence to contest Del Rey’s own. Gone are the assertive, motorik beats that bolstered the ingratiating pop of 2012’s Born to Die, along with the noir-shaded riffs and build-release rock dynamics the Black Keys’s Dan Auerbach brought to the heavier Ultraviolence. Honeymoon was written and produced entirely by Del Rey and her two closest collaborators, Rick Nowels and Kieron Menzies, resulting in both her least embellished album and also her longest. It’s a full hour of expressively expressive-less music—unmitigated solipsism as an aesthetic choice. Sam C. Mac



Lana Del Ray

8. Lana Del Ray (2010)

Unlike, say, Katy Perry’s Christian rock-oriented Katy Hudson, Elizabeth Grant’s debut—released under the name and title Lana Del Ray—is, for the most part, sonically and thematically of a piece with the rest of the singer’s catalog. Songs like “Jump” and “Queen of the Gas Station” are bouncier and glossier than the material on Del Rey’s major label debut, Born to Die, but the infectious, trip-hop-infused “Gramma (Blue Ribbon Sparkler Trailer Heaven)” would fit snugly alongside “Diet Mountain Dew,” and preoccupations with all things Americana (“Oh Say Can You See”) and sugar daddies (“Put Me in a Movie”) abound. Doom and gloom permeate almost every aspect of the artist’s depiction of modern life, and these songs are no exception: “I’m in love with a dyin’ man,” she croons on the opening track, “Kill Kill.” Lana Del Ray represents an artist whose carefully crafted persona and distinct sound weren’t quite fully formed yet, but a few songs—including the guitar-driven “Raise Me Up” and the deliciously clubby “Brite Lights” (think Britney on Xanax)—hint at the intriguing, if less cult-inducing, paths Del Rey’s career might have taken. Cinquemani

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Lust for Life

7. Lust for Life (2017)

Del Rey’s fourth album, Lust for Life, is a sprawling contemplation of Del Rey’s aesthetic and its various dissonances. It’s overextended at almost 75 minutes, but even in its flaws is the sense that Del Rey is working to disillusion her earlier work’s fetish of a tainted Americana. The first half hedges its contemporary pop signifiers (trap percussion, a duet with the Weeknd) with sonic elements that draw on various retro influences (the doo-wop backing of “Lust for Life,” the tremolo guitar effects and lo-fi drum rolls of “Cherry”) until arriving at three songs, two featuring A$AP Rocky, that push Del Rey as close to a contemporary sound as she’s gotten in years. Then comes Lust for Life’s hipster-baiting centerpiece, “Coachella – Woodstock in My Mind,” which again finds an avenue back in time. Del Rey’s fairly corny autobiographical account of experiencing a Father John Misty set with her best friend (who happens to be his wife) eventually opens up into a slightly less corny musing on spiritual and cultural affinities shared between the worlds of concertgoers in 1969 and 2017. More importantly, the song acts as a kind of portal, transitioning us from a more modern-leaning pop sound to the folky material that dominates Lust for Life’s latter half. Mac



Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd

6. Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd (2023)

Clocking in at 78 minutes, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd doesn’t have the concise flow of 2021’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club, but it also doesn’t make the big statement that might have justified its length. There’s a tension forged on the album between modernity and classicalism, between songs that wish to break free from the confines of what constitutes traditional material for Del Rey and those that simply maintain the status quo, like the graceful, if ultimately routine, “Sweet” and “Fingertips.” Ocean Blvd traffics in some nimble, effervescent melodies, a few memorable vocal passages, and the occasional tuneful duet (Father John Misty proves to be an exceptional bedfellow on “Let the Light In”). But the album feels more like a placeholder in Del Rey’s discography than a truly audacious chapter in the singer’s blossoming late-period reawakening. Paul Attard

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Blue Banisters

5. Blue Banisters (2021)

“Let’s keep it simple, babe/Don’t make it complicated,” Lana Del Rey purrs at the start of “Beautiful,” a track from her eighth album, Blue Banisters. The lyric serves as a statement of purpose, reflecting the album’s pared-down arrangements. The decision to keep the music sparse draws focus to the lyrical content, which is some of the most razor-sharp and bitingly funny of Del Rey’s career. A fascination with color, a recurring thread that’s ever-shifting in its meaning, is weaved throughout Blue Banisters. When, on “Beautiful,” Del Rey quips, “What if someone had asked/Picasso not to be sad…there would be no blue period,” we understand “blue” to represent not just a state of depression, but one that yields inspiration. Del Rey’s vocals are as cherubic and distant as ever, stuck in a daydream but exactingly so. Sure, there’s an odd bit at the end of “Living Legend” where Del Rey’s trilling is processed through a wah-wah pedal, and there are several, perhaps inevitable, instances of thematic retreads from past albums. But by stripping back the sonic density of her previous work and taking its sweet time to unfold, Blue Banisters further fleshes out Del Rey’s increasingly vivid personal world. Charles Lyons-Burt



Chemtrails Over the Country Club

4. Chemtrails Over the Country Club (2021)

The way Lana Del Rey connects different songs to one another, even across different albums (like Lust for Life’s “Cherry” and Norman Fucking Rockwell’s “Venice Bitch”), is peerless—perhaps rivaled only by Taylor Swift—and partly what makes her work so enveloping. On Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Del Rey delights in dropping breadcrumbs: Her discussions of jewels on the title track links with mentions of the same on a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “For Free,” and she sings fondly of her ranch near Coldwater Canyon, which “sometimes…feels like [her] only friend,” on “Tulsa Jesus Freak” and “Dance Till We Die.” These thoughtfully connected threads make the album feel as if it’s in dialogue with itself and the rest of Del Rey’s catalog. And while it doesn’t engage with our current moment or hot-button issues as urgently as Norman Fucking Rockwell does, it’s also part of a larger pop-cultural conversation—or at least, it has some hilarious and apt references to astrology, Kings of Leon, and How Green Was My Valley. Lyons-Burt

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Ultraviolence

3. Ultraviolence (2014)

Lana Del Rey’s second LP, Ultraviolence, is a kind of millennial noir, all gauzy damsels, bruised cheekbones, and Chevy Malibus. Pop has rarely been this sultry, or masochistic, for that matter. Del Rey, with her melodramatic, sneeringly false narratives, courts both loathing and desire, oscillating between demands for “money, power, and glory” and displays of naked vulnerability. After all, Del Rey reminds us, she’s “pretty when [she cries].” Neither the coolness of her vocal timbre nor the malaise of her delivery can quite disguise the fact that she’s a pop singer almost without peer in her generation, assisted by producer Dan Auerbach’s dreamy minimalism and the ghosts of jazz and ‘70s pop. Del Rey chronicles the failure of a kind of American dream that only persists in sepia-toned commercials and Death of a Salesman productions. “I’m a bad girl/I’m a sad girl,” she swoons on “Sad Girl,” with all the self-conscious tragedy of Jay Gatsby staring across the bay at the green light on the end of Daisy’s dock. Our nostalgia might be for a betrayal that never happened, but it still hurts. Caleb Caldwell



Born to Die

2. Born to Die (2012)

However much hate she may have accrued for her sleepy, sarcastic take on pop stardom, Lana Del Rey emerged as one of the decade’s true success stories, pushing past the flash-in-the-pan accusations into a uniquely absorbing post-modern figure, succeeding not in spite of the remarkably exposed, freely exploitative bent of her music, but because of it. Born to Die stands out as a startlingly composed premiere effort, a daring, dead-eyed statement from a chanteuse who wears her character on her sleeve, making herself immune to the flung arrows of detractors by exaggerating the sexuality, vapidity, and artificial gangsterism to cartoonish levels, an album of lush orchestral pop capped by Del Rey’s inimitably somnolent delivery. Jesse Cataldo

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Norman Fucking Rockwell

1. Norman Fucking Rockwell (2019)

Norman Rockwell’s vision of America defined much of the 20th century, with illustrations that often depicted a sentimental—some might say naïve—interpretation of American life. Despite its parodic title, though, Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell doesn’t so much subvert an idealistic notion of the American dream as perform a postmortem of it. On “Venice Bitch,” which is rife with references to quintessential American icons like Robert Frost, Del Rey pines for a world that had already coughed its last gasp by the time she was born. And she wistfully delivers a eulogy for both pop culture and the planet itself on the apocalyptic “The Greatest”: “The culture is lit and if this is it, I had a ball,” she laments with a shrug. Distilled to their barest elements, the songs reveal themselves not to be hollow vessels for vapid self-absorption, but frank assessments of the psychic effects of a world spiraling into chaos. Del Rey has long cemented her status as a cult icon in the vein of a Tori Amos or Fiona Apple, whose influence on the title track is unmistakable, and she inspires the kind of fanaticism that often leaves her detractors perplexed. With Norman Fucking Rockwell, however, she’s made an album with the unfettered focus and scope worthy of her lofty repute. Cinquemani

4 Comments

  1. I completely disagree with HONEYMOON being the “worst” Lana album, considering the first half alone is jam packed with some of her most inspired melodies. The vulnerable vocal refrain of “Terrence Loves You,” the haunting “God Knows I Tried,” the smooth clapback to the critics on “High By the Beach.” then topped with “Freak,” an incredibly produced understated trap sex romp? Stop playing Slant Magazine!!!

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