Venice Bitch by Lana Del Rey

"Venice Bitch", the second extract of Lana Del Rey's new album Norman Rockwell Fucking, is different from anything she's ever written – but it takes a while to achieve it. Lana opens the song with a series of classic Lana-isms: she admits she's short of fucking to give, rhyming "ice cream" with "ice queen", alluding to dreams in jeans and leather. In a strangely familiar chorus – which blends into the mix just when you expected it – she promises allegiance to a particular type of "American-made" devotion, so remote that it could be a memory or a vintage car disappearing from view. the passing lane.

You think you've heard it before and Lana is here with you. "You write, I do the tour / We make it work," she sings with the cadence of someone who has been used to the routine for a long time. But as often happens when we start to be comfortable, things slip off the rails. Nearly 10 minutes away, "Venice Bitch" is the longest song in Lana Del Rey's catalog; It's also one of his most exciting. Although her work has never been minimalist (few artists understand the importance of writing a good bridge so well), she never allowed herself to sink so completely into an atmosphere, plunging deep into the bluish and gloomy grooves of the song. She speaks as clearly through the many snags of the song as through her wall of buzzing guitars or the long winding synth solo that divides her story into two hallucinating halves.

Like last week's "Mariners Apartment Complex", the atmosphere of "Venice Bitch" is firmly in the golden haze of 1970s FM radio. But where the arrangement of the previous song sometimes resembled a flashback "This Is Us", "Venice Bitch" is more brutal and more alive. For an artist so immersed in her lineage, Lana has never really sold the nostalgia: her nods to the past often play more than extraterrestrial transmissions. So, even when she screams at a mid-century painter and at wholesale police, the refrain of an old-fashioned standard, "Venice Bitch" looks more like an ode to embrace the present . Nothing gold can stay, but some times persist longer than others.