Lana Del Rey poses for a portrait during a visit to 107.7 The End on Oct. 2, 2019 in Seattle, Washington.
Mat Hayward/Getty ImagesLana Del Rey is turning a purple patch into a shade of blue.
The alternative pop singer and songwriter will drop a new album on July 4, bearing the name Blue Banisters.
Del Rey has been prolific of late. She recently released Chemtrails Over The Country Club album, which hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart. Shortly after, the U.S. artist announced that another new album, Rock Candy Sweet, will arrive on June 1.
And in late 2020, she debuted her poetry collection Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass.
It remains unclear if Blue Banisters is a different working title for Rock Candy Sweet, or whether that album will drop as planned. What is clear, however, is that Del Rey is enjoying the most creative phase of her career so far.
As least some of those energies are a borne from criticism. On her Instagram Stories on March 20, Del Rey shared a screenshot of an article from Harper's Bazaar that had a dig at her.
"Just want to say thank you again for the kind articles like this one and for reminding me that my career was built on cultural appropriation and glamorizing domestic abuse," she quipped via sideways text overlaying the article. "I will continue to challenge those thoughts on my next record on June 1 titled Rock Candy Sweet."
ALBUM REVIEWS
Listening to Karin Ann’s debut album ‘Through the Telescope’, you’d be forgiven for not realising that the Slovakian singer-songwriter is just 21-years-old. There is a knowing darkness to this music, which brims with observations earned through experience and the mystique of an author with many stories to tell.
“All his skin eaten by worms / Nothing left there / A pile of bones”, Ann sings on ‘Pile of Bones’. For all its macabre imagery – a through line across the album’s 14 tracks – the song is delivered like a fairytale, with Ann’s soft, ethereal vocals floating like wisps of smoke around its beating heart.
Her singing voice is light, calling to mind the ease and indie droll of Faye Webster and Frankie Cosmos. It all feeds into the album’s curious mix of light and dark, as Ann sings through honeyed whispers of deep emotional strife, from losing faith to leaving childhood behind too early, embedding these dark secrets in twinkling melodies and delicate guitar strings. “The band keeps playing while I continue to cry”, she sings softly on dollhouse-like track ‘The Band Keeps Playing’. “Maybe they won’t see that my dress keeps tearing / And it’s swallowing me”.
Ann’s songwriting is at its strongest when it goes for specifics. There’s queer love song ‘Olivia’, ‘A Song for the Moon’ – a love letter to the darker sides of herself – or ‘My Best Work of Art’, the album’s lovely closer that chronicles Ann’s reclamation of her own identity through the lens of painting and brushstrokes.
After a tough few years fighting illness and cutting her teeth in music, Ann delivers a confident and unflinching debut album. ‘Through The Telescope’ weaves her personal struggles into beautiful, potent songwriting, which she gives space to breathe amidst lush vocals and rich, but never overblown instrumentation. Dancing deftly across folk, rock, country and pop, and spanning emotional landscapes from lovestruck to melancholy, this is a most precocious debut.
