Review: Lana Del Rey, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd

Lana Del Rey’s Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd opens with a misdirection of sorts: “The Grants” begins with background vocalists Melodye Perry, Pattie Howard, and Shikena Jones rehearsing the song’s hook—specifically the refrain “I’m gonna take mine of you with me/Like ‘Rocky Mountain High,’ the way John Denver sings”—before, after almost a minute, the track abruptly transitions into a melancholic Lana Del Rey piano ballad in the tradition of so many melancholic Lana Del Rey piano ballads.

This initial bait-and-switch is one of the album’s many choices that feel more confusing than bold or challenging, where Del Rey’s impulses seem less motivated by experimentation than by a willingness to confound. Another is the inclusion of two lengthy collage-style interludes that are sandwiched around the album’s sixth track, “Candy Necklaces,” killing any momentum that the previous three songs manage to muster. And the bewildering “Peppers,” a flaccid hip-hop crossover attempt featuring Tommy Genesis, is clumsily tacked on near the end of the tracklist.

These odd structural and production quirks define much of Ocean Blvd, which ranks as one of Del Rey’s most obtuse artistic statements to date. 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.”

Clocking in at a bloated 78 minutes, Ocean Blvd is also Del Rey’s longest album, but while it doesn’t have the concise flow of 2021’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club, it’s also doesn’t make the big statement that might have justified its length. The spacey title track, for example, strains hard for Del Rey’s poeticism, with overcooked lyrics like “Fuck me to death, love me until I love myself” taking the wind out of its sails before it ever really gets going.

Ocean Blvd lacks the consistency of the similarly sprawling Norman Fucking Rockwell! That’s in part because the album pads out its runtime with filler like “Margaret,” a track dedicated to longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff’s fiancé, actress Margaret Qualley. That potentially sweet gesture is undercut by the producer himself, who sings one of the song’s verses, rendering the entire thing too self-serving for its pathos to have its intended effect.

The galaxy-brained “A&W” is easily the most adventurous and successful song on Ocean Blvd, effectively bridging the gap between the album’s two stylistic poles. “It’s not about havin’ someone to love me anymorе/This is the experience of bein’ an American whore,” Del Rey pensively observes after she and a lover have “fuck[ed] on the hotel floor.” A little later she recognizes that she’s “over my head” in this current relationship, as the despondent tone in her voice grows wearier as the track progresses. She ends up getting the last laugh during the song’s explosive second half, which, after a few plodding minutes of reverb-soaked bass, shifts into high gear: “Your mom called, I told her you’re fucking up big time” she repeatedly taunts.

There are plenty of other memorably crafty flourishes sprinkled throughout the album, like on the clever “Paris, Texas,” which plays with romantic notions of running away to Europe. Del Rey first claims she “went to Paris,” only to reveal that it was a town in Texas. That, along with further references to Florence (Alabama) and Venice (California) as other cities she’s traveled to, suggests that the song’s protagonist is forever trapped in a perpetual cycle of stateside ennui where even if you know that “it’s time to go,” escaping one’s past is a futile effort.

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.