(Credits: Lana Del Rey)
Mon 16 June 2025 22:00, UK
Lana Del Rey is a throwback. She always has been from the moment that music video for ‘Video Games’ dropped and made her one of the most vital, talked about musicians on the planet, and that furore hasn’t really dropped since. Yet for all the visions of Nancy Sinatra and classic Hollywood femininity, there has always been something thrillingly modern about her, too. After all, those breathtaking shots of her in the ‘Video Games’ video were shot on a webcam.
That hazy, evocative feeling that you’re watching someone timeless, yet utterly of the moment, is part of what makes her such a captivating figure. That and her absolutely astonishing back catalogue of songs, which is another part of what makes her a throwback in my eyes. The idea that a musician in the 21st century can be a big enough deal to sell out multiple nights at Wembley Stadium in a heartbeat while following nothing more than the whims of her artistic vision is absurd. Yet, here we are.
There’s Lana as a hip-pop ingenue on Born To Die; Lana as a soft-rock siren on Ultraviolence; Lana as the ultimate Cali singer songwriter of her masterpiece Norman Fucking Rockwell!. Since then, her albums have lost their rigid musical structure as she experiments with formless, almost meditational songwriting on Blue Bannisters and Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. These records haven’t made her a cult sensation, but one of the biggest acts in music.
Due to that, a number of her most powerful songs go a little under the radar to those outside of her die-hards, even those that make up her most celebrated albums. Case in point, my absolute favourite Lana Del Rey track is one that has never even appeared at one of her headline concerts, despite being on her most critically acclaimed and beloved record.
What makes this Lana Del Rey track such an overlooked gem?
To be clear, the riches on offer on Norman Fucking Rockwell! are such that I don’t think it’s a crime aganst music that ‘How To Disappear’ doesn’t get the flowers it deserves. As a song, though, spellbinding barely covers it. What’s more, I think it’s the song that comes closest to summing up Lana’s appeal as a futuristic throwback than anything else.
After all, this is a song built around a doo-wop chord sequence that, while familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of girl-group music of the 1960s, still hits like a train. Lana’s hushed, velveteen contralto drifts over a backdrop of a quivering string quartet and a vintage drum machine. Sparse and hushed until Lana drifts up her vocal range in breathtaking fashion during the beguiling pre-chorus.
While the sound is a triumph of Lana’s work with Jack Antonoff, it’s her songwriting that’s the standout here. While her more recent output can get a little woolly and dense in the sheer amount of verbiage she packs into her work, ‘How To Disappear’ is a triumph of storytelling: Lana Del Rey leading the track with a novelist’s eye for a telling detail, the cuts on her lover’s face, the sky lighting up as she writes and another love cracking open a beer as she mistakes his coldness for stoicism.
To me, it’s the beating heart of her best album. The song’s staggering second half takes flight with an expanded sonic palette reflecting the narrator’s expanded view on life, before everything else drops out as Lana tells the listener that she’ll “always be right here”. Absolute magic that shows enough to tell a compelling story, yet keeps enough to remain mysterious.
It’s Lana Del Rey at her absolute best, and if it could become a staple of her live set, I’d be far from the only person delighted by that.
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