‘Thunder’ is more mellow in tone, but still hits hard. This vocal turn is a shock at first, but ultimately so, so satisfying. She lets loose on the chorus, almost screaming the muffled lyrics: “I don’t wanna live / I don’t wanna give you nothing / Cause you’ll never give me nothing back / Why can’t you be good for something / Not one shirt off your back”. ‘Dealer’ is a dreamy array comprising contrasting elements: Miles Kane’s pleasingly slippery vocals and Del Rey at her most unbound. ‘Dealer’ and ‘Thunder’ are disparate from the rest of the album in both sound and content-they really don’t belong here-but to be honest, I’m glad I can finally hear them. Hands down, the best songs on Blue Banisters come from a completely different project: an unfinished 2017 collaboration with The Last Shadow Puppets. I only wish she had either stopped here or waited to create more songs in this style, rather than adding so much filler content. Although the shift in production on these new songs leaves them feeling to some extent unfinished, the sound is coherent and perfectly accompanies Del Rey’s self-reflective journey. We gain a gloriously funny glimpse into Del Rey’s family dynamic as she sings: “You name your babe Lilac Heaven / After your iPhone 11 / “Crypto forever,” screams your stupid boyfriend / Fuck you, Kevin”. ‘Sweet Caroline’, co-written with Del Rey’s sister and father, is a song dedicated to her sister’s newborn. It is similar in soundscape to the captivating love song for LA, ‘Arcadia’, and the perhaps too on-the-nose defence of sad art, ‘Beautiful’. The title track, ‘Blue Banisters’, is a sensitive, piano-driven ode to friendship that traces her introspection during interactions with her friends. Del Rey addresses childhood trauma in ‘Text Book’ and ‘Wildflower Wildfire’ over raw, disjunctive production that acts as a soundboard to her breathy vocals, which sound more vulnerable than ever. The ‘new’ portion of the album, however, demonstrates a clear shift in sound and a turn towards more biographically-focused lyrics in order to paint a fuller picture of her life.

If this is indeed Del Rey’s “story”, it largely consists of songs that were superfluous to other albums, and don’t tell us anything about her we don’t already know. For a record that Del Rey claims “tells my story and pretty much nothing else”, the last thing fans expected was for a compilation of unreleased songs from multiple Lana ‘eras’ to make up over half of the tracklist, leaving only seven songs worth of new material.

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel rushed. In true Lana style, the album was not released in June, as was initially intended. These concerns manifested multifariously in Blue Banisters. It foreshadowed two potential missteps: firstly, that in addressing ‘the haters’ Del Rey would alienate her remaining fans once and for all (previous attempts have seen her digging herself into holes of racism and classism) and secondly, that the quick turnaround would produce a bad album. When Lana Del Rey announced her eighth studio album just weeks after the release of Chemtrails Over the Country Club, along with the sentiment that it would articulate her thoughts on a critical Harper’s Bazaar article that accused her of cultural appropriation and glamorizing abuse, alarm bells began to sound.

Sweet caroline lyrics lana del rey