Review: Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd by Lana Del Rey

Lana Del Rey’s best albums unfold boundlessly: gathering U.S. pop culture references over decades, shredding toxic relationships detail by detail and exploring the intimate bonds between violence and love. Since her debut over ten years ago, her wild, nihilistic glamour has exposed the oppressive cultural prisms of white America through the lenses of iconography like California, white mustangs, blue jeans, Art Deco, Guns and Roses, and Brooklyn. 

Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd represents more of that revelatory drama, often sounding like a greatest hits of Lana’s playbook. It spans genres from psychedelic rock to folk to trap, sprinkling in classic Lana-isms from “Your mom called, I told her, you’re fucking up big time” to “If you want some basic bitch, go to the Beverly Center and find her.

But much of the album also feels more insular and ghostly than the maximalist production on Norman Fucking Rockwell! or Ultraviolence. The lush, cinematic production that has come to become characteristic of Lana’s work mostly takes on a restrained, breathy quality in DYKTTTUOB. The introduction to Lana’s first verse on “The Grants” sounds like a thunderstorm breaking on a lonely horizon, and the anchoring piano wavers into dissonance in “Candy Necklace,” giving the songs a delicate quality.

Thematically, the album embraces a similar, more intimate promise: exploring the possibilities of retreating from the self-delusions of coastal city relationships into some semblance of normalcy. “I’m in the mountains/I’m probably running away from the feelings I get,” she confesses on “Kintsugi.” As in the folk spirit of her sixth album Chemtrails Over the Country Club, religious themes like light and godly signals of transformation materialize throughout, with a spoken word from celebrity church pastor Judah Smith making a dramatic appearance. The surprising beauty in the mundane—the Paris, Texases or the Florence, Alabamas of the world—represents a healing escape.

In true Lana fashion, though, DYKTTTUOB is more complicated: it also grapples with the sudden awareness of mortality that death causes, and the ways in which past traumas upend conventional familial relations. For Lana, who was sent away to a boarding school because of her alcoholism when she was 14, and lived with a host family in Spain when she was 16, “normalcy” is impossible. 

Those themes crescendo at the album’s most minimal: the heart-wrenching ballads of “Kintsugi” and “Fingertips,” which Lana described in an interview with Billie Eilish as “Seven-minute rant[s] with a repetitive melody.” On both tracks, the production features swelling strings and layered flourishes that gently ripple in and out, allowing emotions to permeate through the cracks. Lana’s voice often seems closer and more real than ever before.

“Kintsugi” finds Lana struggling with memories and grief after deaths in her family, concluding on the beautiful optimism of repairing one’s wounds and continuing to live life. The sprawling, stream-of-consciousness “Fingertips” contemplates the unfairness of death and the tragedy of life, from the suicide of her uncle to the death of a childhood friend to Lana’s mental health issues and the possibility that she might have a child. The lyrics range from the abstract to the chillingly specific: “All I wanted to do was kiss Aaron Greene and sit by/the lake twisting lime into the drinks that they made/have a babe at sixteen in the town I was born in, and die.” But the song's apotheosis is at 3:47, right before that line is delivered, when Lana's voice breaks on the words "of mother" and gives way to a splash of glitter that makes death seem so close by.

That unbound honesty bleeds into “Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father when he’s deep-sea fishing,” where Lana asks to stay grounded while defending her authenticity. The bridge is confessional and cathartic: “I'm folk, I'm jazz, I'm blue, I'm green/Regrettably, also a white woman,” she declares, with the piano surging and percussion spraying sea breezes around her. 

After the thumping beat drop of “Fishtail,” though, DYKTTTUOB goes back to grimier, faster-paced depictions of love unchained. The familiarity of classic Lana-isms return, with imagery like “Swingin’ in a nightgown under the old oak tree/almost Victorian with you, you can talk to me.” Hip-hop and trap influences dominate the Tommy Genesis-featuring “Peppers,” and the maximalist synths of “Fishtail” coalesce and echo around Lana’s voice like rolling hills.

When the alternate version of 2019’s “Venice Bitch” finally plays on “Taco Truck x VB,” with skittering snares and muffled drums below giving an underwater quality to the production, Del Rey’s voice expands to fill up vast space, creating an atmosphere of release. The mix of such radically different sounds and themes still feels so natural and cohesive, building on years of genre-bending and experimentation. It’s a Lana Del Rey album, after all.

Note from me:

I spent a total of four hours on this review. but I'm working on writing more beautifully. My sentences need more variance I guess but I don't know how to do that in an informational setting (yet). if you're reading this thanks a lot. this is like my void for now!