While the three songs are beautiful, using them on the album feels lazy on Del Rey’s part. Since then, Lana has always kept listeners guessing: Informed equally by classic-rock mythology and modern hip-hop attitude, she can casually name-drop Lou Reed in a dream-pop serenade (2014’s “Brooklyn Baby”) as effortlessly she communes with R&B futurist The Weeknd (2017’s “Lust for Life”). As I had already heard all three songs on Spotify playlists for unreleased Lana music, it felt like the album transitioned from a stand-alone Lana album into Ultraviolence 2.0 or a compilation of Lana’s greatest unreleased hits. Not only did the song prove it was possible to cultivate genuine mystique in the age of oversharing, but it also carved out a space for languid, Twin Peaks-worthy art-pop amid a Top 40 normally reserved for jacked-up pop anthems. The outtakes/ unreleased work was from Ultraviolence (Living Legend, If You Lie Down Next To Me, Nector of The Gods, Cherry Blossoms), Chemtrails Over the Country Club (Dealer, Black Baithing Suit), and from Lanas unreleased collaboration album with The Last Shadow Puppets (Thunder). At a time when social media was giving people the power to curate their identities and present idealized versions of themselves online, the struggling singer-songwriter once known as Lizzy Grant (born in New York in 1985) reinvented herself as Lana Del Rey for her epochal 2011 single “Video Games.” The wistful orchestral ballad (and an accompanying Super 8-style video that heralded the ubiquity of soft-focus Instagram filters) introduced a femme fatale who delighted in breaking hearts and the internet alike, knowingly using coquettish sex-kitten cliches as a means to probe male behavior and, by extension, the American id itself.
Though she’s got the name and look of a ’60s-era Hollywood star, Lana Del Rey could only have emerged in the internet era.