Lana Del Rey’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club is a hazy vision of mythic America

Lana Del Rey’s new album opens with “White Dress”, a song about lost innocence. Its protagonist is a celebrity looking back at when she was 19 and working as a waitress in Orlando. “I wasn’t famous,” Del Rey sings at the breathiest, highest point of her register, pushing against her vocal limit as though straining for something that can’t be reached. “Kinda makes me feel/Like maybe I was better off,” she sighs.

The singer once worked as a waitress herself, in Long Island, not Florida. The song’s action takes place in the early 2000s, which is also when Del Rey, or Lizzy Grant as she was then, was doing her waitressing. The high register resembles her earliest singing style, before she crafted a new name from Lana Turner and Ford’s Del Rey sedan car, and made her breakthrough with 2012’s Born to Die. But “White Dress” isn’t to be trusted as an act of memoir. Orlando is the home of theme parks, not unvarnished confessionals.

Del Rey has created her own musical theme park in her seven albums, a mythic America of fame, riches, desire and ennui. Comparisons to the director David Lynch are encouraged: new track “Wild at Heart” mimics the title of a Lynch film. But his sense of evil is missing. Pollution in her songs is less intensive, like the “chemtrails” in the title of her new album — a reference to aeroplane emissions, which conspiracy theorists believe to cause mind control.

Chemtrails Over the Country Club gives no credence to that loopy notion. The contrails in the title track are decorative, patterned above the country club where the song’s narrator frolics in the swimming pool, a wild rich kid. A vaguely delineated tension between innocence and corruption recurs. The latter is depicted, or felt, as a kind of worldliness, “the weight of fame,” as she puts it in “Dance Till We Die”. Country and folk motifs gesture towards an idealised state of American simplicity.

The music continues in the mode of her previous album Norman Fucking Rockwell!, also produced by Jack Antonoff (Taylor Swift, Lorde). Never the quickest to begin with, her songs’ pace has slowed. Melodies shimmer almost psychedelically at the edge of the action, like heat haze. Just as boredom threatens to steal over the listener, a flurry of activity shakes things up — a jazzy drum solo, say, or a swaggering passage of blues-rock.

A fantasy of the free-flowing music scene centred on Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon in the hippy era is made explicit by a cover of Joni Mitchell’s “For Free”, from her 1970 album Ladies of the Canyon. Del Rey’s vocals subtly change emphasis with the characters that she plays, her equivalent of Mitchell’s canyon-dwellers. The contours of her richly mapped imaginative world have softened, but her performances get stronger.

★★★★☆

‘Chemtrails Over the Country Club’ is released by Polydor