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Music

Lana Del Rey's Doomed, Weary 'Honeymoon' Is the Perfect Album for Her to Have Made Right Now

On her latest album, Lana Del Rey is doubling down on the morose and digging deeper into her arsenal of depicting a certain type of feminine sadness.

Lana Del Rey drowns in vowels. Her voice may wobble and wail when she sings of feeling most vulnerable, which she does in large supply on Honeymoon, her gloomy, depths-plumbing third album. But on long, open sounds, especially the ones that convey sadness the most, her instrument envelops not just her but anything nearby, becoming the focal point to such an extent that it causes a narrowing of the field. This is her sadness; it will be given up to you.

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"We both know that it's not—fashionable to love me," she sings at the opening of the title track, over weeping-willow strings worthy of a Douglas Sirk score. This will not be a happy honeymoon; it'll more resemble the one in Elaine May's 1972 movie The Heartbreak Kid, which follows Charles Grodin's Lenny Cantrow as he uses his first trip away with his newly betrothed to frolic with a wide-eyed co-ed played by Cybill Shepherd. That movie might be four-plus decades old, but the songs remain the same: "Music To Watch Boys To" calls back to the catered-to manboys who populated her debut Born To Die; "Terrence Loves You" wearily calls out to a musician who refuses to change for love.

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On Honeymoon, Del Rey and her characters grasp at cliché as they tumble further into the darkness, using words that they've heard on TV or espied in greeting cards in order to fully express the voids at their center. "I live to love you"; "let sleeping dogs lay; "be a freak like me"; "Ground Control to Major Tom"—all these phrases refract into a picture of Del Rey and the women she sings about, one further smeared by the type of love that sends people down wells. On "God Knows I Tried," she sings the titular phrase over and over again, with increasing despair, until the words become unrecognizable the way that anything does after being viewed so close up. Only "Burnt Norton," where she primly reads some of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" over a gauzy musical bed, possesses 20-20 lyrical clarity, although Eliot put his words to page years before emoji were even invented.

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Honeymoon ends with a laconic cover of The Animals' "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood," which offers a coda to not just its first line but to the whole Lana Del Rey thing as it stands in the fall of 2015. Four years ago, she was standing in for the Most Photographed Barn In The Blogosphere, with writers glomming narrative onto every one of her flutters and sighs. She's since graduated to bona fide pop star, with a top-ten hit and tracks on blockbuster soundtracks, not to mention younger artists who are walking, wounded, in her footsteps—the broken music box dancer Melanie Martinez, the morphine drip of the @sosadtoday Twitter account.

Yet she's also kept relatively quiet—one of the few interviews she did in the run-up to Honeymoon was a chat with her ersatz biographer James Franco for V, the clickiest bits of which (about "feminism," natch) were duly aggregated by those sites dealing in music-related celebrity. And sonically, Honeymoon is if not a hard shove at least a distancing from even the most apocalyptic-sounding pop—Del Rey's trills on the slip-sliding "Art Deco" coexist alongside the harsh synths at its base, while "Swan Song" broods at half-time, with Del Rey moaning "I will never sing again" as if it's a vow she uttered aloud while dreaming. It's a long, tough album to experience in a single sitting; it's bruised and weary (sometimes without even knowing that it is), and its few moments of hope seem even more difficult to take because of the doomed place from which they come. There are some moments where her deliberately downbeat delivery brings to mind the banshee-like wails of Dry-era PJ Harvey; looking at depression up close can be almost as horrifying as watching someone scream.

But she's merely a soul whose intentions are good, and Honeymoon is probably the perfect record for Lana Del Rey to put out at this point in her career—she's doubling down on the morose, digging deeper into her arsenal of depicting a certain type of feminine sadness, a type that's almost proscribed by society but not quite, in excruciating detail. If you knew who Lana Del Rey really was before you hitched yourself to her wagon, after all, this Honeymoon would hardly be anything resembling a surprise.

It's the last day of summer, so you know how Maura Johnston feels. Follow her on Twitter.