To coincide with the long awaited release of her latest album, Lana Del Rey has dropped a new single, 'White Dress', and premiered the accompanying video. Lana's 'White Dress' is the third single to be taken from the album following the title track, 'Chemtrails Over The Country Club', and last year's lead single, 'Let Me Love You Like A Woman'.
Initially titled 'White Hot Forever', a lyric taken from the album track, 'Tulsa Jesus Freak', 'Chemtrails Over The Country Club' is Lana Del Rey's seventh full length studio album and is her follow up to the utterly brilliant album that she released in August 2019, 'Norman F**king Rockwell!'. Her latest album is similarly crafted to NFR! and has just as many exquisite touches.
Lana's vocal is of course the focal point of each song but the arrangements and production do more than enhance each performance. The subtlety with which every song is precisely crafted leaves you bewildered by it's stupefying beauty. LDR is once again on fine form with her lyrical flourishes too, delving back into her past and reminiscing over lost love, her first experiences of stardom and her time spent as a waitress.
Her autobiographical song, 'White Dress', released to coincide with the overdue album, sees Lana singing as expressively, and expansively as we've probably ever heard her. Lana's voice is, at times, almost crying out to convey just how it felt, and how she felt back then. The song, which sets the scene describing a young 19 year old Lana meeting the men of the music business, talks of "Listening to White Stripes when they were white-hot...and Jazz out on the lawn." It is the Jazz influence in Lana's work that has been brought further to the fore on this track, and on her latest album, although there are too snippets of Country and Americana strewn throughout.
'White Dress' itself is a fitting track to open the album. Not that any further proof were needed, but, 'White Dress' once again shows Lana's particular skill at placing you in a moment using a blend of pop-culture references and easily identifiable situational observations. In many respects Del Rey is untouchable when it comes to employing this style of writing. Some may deride it as a kind of pulp fiction equivalent but they're missing the point and missing the inherent beauty of the stylised eloquence.
After teasing trailers of the video for 'White Dress' a few weeks ahead of it's release, the scheduled premier was an eagerly awaited event attracting the hoards of fans desperate to catch the next glimpse of their roller-skating waitress! Neither the song or the video for 'White Dress' are a disappointment, they're both signature Lana Del Rey, and both well worth the wait.