A recent announcement that alluded to media criticism included the line: “I must say I’ve enjoyed moving through the world beautifully – as a woman with grace and dignity.” And while her music sometimes seems tongue-in-cheek, her public statements suggest she takes herself very seriously indeed. Yet, in response to a review of her 2019 album, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Del Rey insisted that she’d “never had a persona, never needed one, never will”. The conversation about whether there has ever been any sort of character at play with Del Rey has orbited her career since her 2011 breakthrough, thanks to her evocative aesthetic – a vaguely low-rent, all-American glamour that harks back to the 60s and 70s – fancy pseudonym (her real name is Lizzy Grant) and her borderline-camp treatment of femininity, toxic relationships and her homeland. The arresting, almost funereal title track begins as a tribute to her girlfriends, before talking about the limits of female solidarity when it comes to heartbreak and unhappy singledom. Yet Blue Banisters is perhaps her most autobiographically straightforward album to date, documenting a failed romance and the inception of her current one, and her relationships with her sister (close) and her mother (difficult). Ultimately, Black Bathing Suit returns to her favoured themes of “bad girls” and negative press attention. Later, she is overcome by signs of ordinary life returning: on Violets for Roses, once run-of-the-mill sights such as young women frolicking maskless and bookshops reopening can now elicit euphoria. “If this is the end, I want a boyfriend / Someone to eat ice-cream with and watch television,” she sings on Black Bathing Suit, a song that appears to nod to lockdown weight gain (“The only thing that still fits me is this black bathing suit”).
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