One of L.A.'s earliest thoroughfares, a locus of establishing the city's car culture, Wilshire runs sixteen miles, and as architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne writes, 'can take you from a world-famous piece of architecture to a weed-choked lot, from a realized ambition to an abandoned one, in the space of a few blocks.' In the opening track, she sings 'We could cruise/ To the blues/ Wilshire Boulevard,' and the name check is shrewd. She has been transfixed by, and riffing on, America since the beginning, but Honeymoon pushes past easy Kennedy kitsch and undulating flags to mine something more specific. It's one of the few tonal misfires on an album that otherwise feels like Del Rey moving into the temple she's built. She is cruelly incisive on 'Art Deco' ('you're just born to be seen'), a highlight that curdles when the careless phrase 'You're so ghetto' comes out in the chorus.

Like Joan Didion's ur-California girl transplant, Maria Wyeth, Del Rey sings like a woman who 'knows what 'nothing' means'-on 'High by the Beach', 'Freak', and 'Art Deco' she sounds beyond longing, like it's been a long time since she felt anything at all. All the gee-whiz irony of previous albums is gone, often she sounds like ABBA's Agnetha FГ¤ltskog roused from a nap, sweet but disconnected. She sings about it all-the sprawl, toxicity, the culture of transactional relationships, the particulars of the light ('God Knows I Tried')-with an East Coast blue-blood accent ('scared' becomes 'skaaaahd'). While she's obviously a pop artist, Honeymoon feels as though it belongs to a larger canon of Southern California Gothic albums- Celebrity Skin, Hotel California, The Hissing of Summer Lawns. Many tracks expand sleepily past the five- or six-minute mark, which is to say that Honeymoon's languor takes our attention for granted. The programmed drums of 'High by the Beach' and 'Religion' wait nearly a minute to enter, and 'Terrence Loves You' is even sparser. It's rare to get to a chorus within the first minute, and until that point it's usually just Lana, maybe a little guitar or some cinematic strings.

It knows that we want big, sad, fucked-up epics. Honeymoon acknowledges what, or rather who, we are here for. Her previous two records felt like earnest stabs at finding a pop context for that voice, but they were both overwrought, and Honeymoon's arrangements feel built to rectify that. As a singer, Del Rey sounds more like the singer of her pre-Lana Lizzy Grant days here, when she was was performing torch songs in secretarial skirts at A&R showcases, looking too young to seem so haunted. The setting is pitch-perfect and a million mothballed years away from the current pop landscape it's strange, a barometer of youth culture trading in such old music.

The morose orchestral grandeur of the album feels like an arrival point, and also possibly a dead-end: the sentimentality and dramaВ throws back to old HollywoodВ film scores. The moment is Honeymoon's emotional apex, but it still moves at the pace of a funeral march, and the release it depicts is that of embracing rock bottom. It's not until 'The Blackest Day', eleven songs in, that Honeymoon's static depression gives way to apocalyptic ecstasy, as she gasps 'In all the wrong places/ Oh my God' in multi-tracked harmonies on the chorus. On the title track, when she croons 'Our honeymoon/ Say you want me too', she's dopily hopeful as Brian Wilson singing 'We could be married/ And then we'll be happy.' The album luxuriates in this bleak space between dream and reality, which stretches endlessly from one melancholy track to the next. The romance here is closer to addiction-something that's sought for its ability to blot out the rest of life's miseries. It's an album about love, but 'love', as Del Rey sings it, sounds like mourning.

Accordingly, Honeymoon is a dark work, darker even than Ultraviolence, and the pall does not lift for its 60-plus minutes.

Honey moon lana del rey album cover