Lana Del Rey has always existed in an awkward in-between state. By most metrics, she’s a pop star – she has multiple platinum and gold records, has been nominated for six Grammys (including Album of the Year), and worked with Taylor Swift and Lorde producer Jack Antonoff on three of her last four albums. But success aside, she’s not really what the phrase “pop star” has come to mean in modern parlance. She sticks out like a sore thumb on “Don’t Call Me Angel,” the promo single for the 2019 Charlie’s Angels reboot she recorded with Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus because, for the most part, she’s nothing like those artists. She doesn’t have Grande’s impossible vocal range or Cyrus’ provocative, in your face personality. Instead, Del Rey seems to delight in being unknowable and opaque, and tries to match this mystique with a coy, dusky vocal style. We’ll never see her holding hands with Pete Davidson or performing at the Final Four because doing so would distract from her ethereal, unknowable image.

And yet, she’s not exactly an indie artist either. She may have gotten Interscope’s attention thanks to her self-uploaded video for “Video Games,” but she immediately became a creature of the industry, doing promotional work for H&M and Jaguar early on in her career. The phrase “industry plant” has outlived its usefulness, but it feels loosely applicable to the kind of artist Del Rey became in her early years. She didn’t emerge organically from a regional scene, her records weren’t discovered after decades of obscurity. Instead, she was born into wealth and treated her music career like a business venture. The “Lana Del Rey” persona isn’t just a stage name or a character – it’s also a brand.

Another large, underappreciated reason that Del Rey feels so out of step with both big budget pop stardom and indie cred is that she’s unusually conversant with music history, especially classic rock. When she declared herself the “gangster Nancy Sinatra” early in her career it felt like a reach, but her recent work has made it clear that she views herself as the heir to the singer/songwriter tradition in the vein of Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits, not pop divas like Madonna or Mariah Carey. While her first few albums featured hip-hop beats and collaborations with artists like The Weekend and A$AP Rocky, her more recent albums emphasized piano, guitar, and her own doleful, husky vocals. 2019’s “The greatest,” an apocalyptic piano ballad featuring a mournful, weeping guitar solo, feels like my generation’s “Miami 2017,” while that same year’s “Venice Bitch” is a more extreme, drawn out version of the kind of psychedelic folk music the actual Nancy Sinatra record with Lee Hazelwood in the late 60s.

It’s songs like those, not her overt pop plays, that have made me believe in the past that Del Rey could be a truly great artist – and for stretches on Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd, she displays that promise once again. There are moments on this album where Del Rey feels like she’s tapped into something timeless and important, that she’s finally going to take off and reach a new stratosphere. But then Antonoff’s heavy hand appears again, or the record’s 77 minute runtime begins to drag, or we get another clear attempt to keep her in step with the pop world, and I’m left wondering how long exactly she can keep this up. How long can she exist in this middle ground she’s carved out for herself and find success? How long can this persona she’s crafted stay interesting? How long before she has to start acting like a normal pop star? These are all questions posed by this album, and while questions can often be more entertaining than definitive answers, I still found this otherwise very good album to be an occasionally vexing experience.

For whatever reason, I tend to prefer the back portions of albums – but there’s no denying that the first eight tracks of Ocean Blvd are its highpoint. It’s also the portion where Del Rey’s voice – both her literal singing voice and her metaphorical artistic voice – feels the most dominant. Part of that is musical and lyrical, its opener “The Grants” is literally about Del Rey’s (birth name Elizabeth Grant) family, and the title track, a sweeping piano ballad, contemplates death and irrelevance through the prism of an abandoned traffic tunnel, “Hotel California,” and Harry Nilsson. “A&W,” the album’s centerpiece, is an epic synthesis of Del Rey’s “experience of bein’ an American whore” balladry (her words, not mine) and her early hip-hop and trap inspired tracks. Ever the music historian, “A&W”’s hypermodern outro is actually an interpolation of Anthony and the Imperials’ “Shimmy Shimmy Ko-Ko Bop,” and the playful, confident pose Del Rey strikes during this movement is a refreshing change of pace from the “I’m in love and whatever shall I do” sad girl persona that’s become her trademark.

But the tracks that stood out the most to me in this portion of the album were the two that aren’t actually songs. After “A&W” comes “Judah Smith Interlude,” a recording of a sermon decrying lust delivered by the eponymous controversial Churchome pastor set to eerie piano and periodically interrupted by Del Rey’s scoffs and snickers. After the Jon Batiste-featuring “Candy Necklace” comes the aptly titled “Jon Batiste Interlude,” another piano heavy track that feels like it was recorded late at night amidst a cloud of cigarette smoke and the scent of whiskey. “I’m feelin’ late and I’m feelin’ early,” Batiste shouts between cackles, as Del Rey can be heard vocalizing and giggling in the background. 

The two interludes make for a compelling heaven and hell contrast, and Del Rey is very keen to make hell sound like a… hell of a lot more fun (and also sure to end Smith’s sermon after he admits “I’ve discovered my preaching is mostly about me”). But more than anything, they give a glimpse of a Del Rey who’s more than just a trash culture chanteuse, but an honest to goodness artist and curator. Because she’s not the centerpiece of these tracks, she no longer feels like the product she’s often accused of being – even though she’s listed as neither the sole songwriter or producer, both of these interludes feel the sonic distillation of the image she’s tried to curate for herself over the past decade plus – a rebel who can’t help but respect the classics. I have nothing against the Grandes or Cyruses of the world, but it’s hard to see any of those kinds of pop stars having the taste, vision, or lack of ego necessary to compose these kinds of tracks. By putting herself in the background, Del Rey makes an ironic but effective argument for her relevance and necessity. 

This good taste and keen musical instinct can also be found elsewhere later on the album; “Paris, Texas” is a delicate pirouette of a melody that helps break up the slower ballads, and Father John Misty duet “Let the Light In” evokes the kind of orchestral songwriters that laid the groundwork for both singers’ careers. But this is a long album, and sometimes its momentum flags. Jack Antonoff burdens Del Rey with the same glacial, hook-averse songwriting that made Taylor Swift’s Midnights such a snooze, and forces us to watch him try and live out his Springsteen fantasies on “Margaret” (it goes okay until he hilariously slurs his last few lines), an otherwise fine barroom ballad that lasts about a minute too long. 

More trouble crops up the more Del Rey tries to sound modern, particularly on the final three tracks, which feel tacked on and out of place. “Fishtail”’s cheesy autotune and half-speed 808s recall The Weeknd at his most turgid, while “Peppers” tries and fails to revive the LA dirtbag vibes of Del Rey’s Born to Die by leaning on a nonsensical Tommy Genesis sample for its hook. “Taco Truck x VB” would be a fine addition bonus track for Ultraviolence, but the inclusion of the “Venice Bitch” sample feels like cheating at best, and lazy at worst. 

Luckily, these three clunkers are easy to avoid. But less easy to avoid, even in the moments in which I enjoy this album, is the nagging question of how long Lana Del Rey can keep doing this. 

Del Rey’s music has evolved a lot through the past ten years, but thematically she’s remained (depending on your perspective) either consistent or inert. That’s not unusual – many great songwriters tend to write about the same or similar things throughout their careers. But declaring Ocean Blvd’s best song to be about “the experience of bein’ an American whore” feels like a dead end – a sort of thesis statement of Del Rey’s career, and one that feels like it doesn’t leave a lot of room for growth. Even from a musical perspective, the piano ballads that have defined Del Rey’s recent albums can only take an artist so far. 

At some point, to remain interesting, a songwriting has to introduce new dynamics and perspectives to their songwriting. I have no doubt that Lana Del Rey has the talent to do so. But I do wonder if, by investing so heavily in her heavily curated image and character, she’s drawn herself into a bit of a box, and I wonder even more if the label execs and producers who would benefit from her becoming a more traditional kind of pop star would be patient enough to let Del Rey indulge in some of her more far out ideas. I have my doubts on both counts – but I’m eager to be proven wrong.