Youtuber, AJayII, has changed her handle hinting she will return to review Lana Del Rey’s latest album after disappearing for over a year

Youtuber AJayII has changed her handle hinting she will return to review Lana Del Rey’s latest album after disappearing for over a year.

So, how do you decipher a body of work as multi-layered and mercurial as Del Rey’s — let alone rank it? The short answer is: with great difficulty and a boulder-sized grain of salt.

With a catalog as consistently great as Del Rey’s, it’s not so much about picking the best album. Rather, the goal is measuring ambition, impact on pop culture and influence on peers. As such, the freshly minted “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd” is at a distinct disadvantage. Time will tell if it spawns a whole generation of clones a la 2012’s “Born to Die” or feels as integral to the musical landscape as 2019’s “Norman Fucking Rockwell.” (For a separate Variety review of the new album

In the meantime, here’s a best attempt at ranking Del Rey’s studio albums, excluding pre-fame releases such as the semi-official “Lana Del Ray aka Lizzy Grant” and extended plays like 2012’s “Paradise.”

Lana has lived many days since then and seemingly found some of them worthwhile. In due course, particularly since the release of her 2019 national pulse check Norman Fucking Rockwell!, her songwriting received the recognition she always knew it deserved. In conversation with Rolling Stone this month, Lana described a great unburdening in her psychic space. She is still talking—and singing—about death. But now, rather than an escape hatch, it’s a framing device through which to peer at her life.

It’s one that Lana takes up vigorously, even if that meaning is sometimes legible only to her. Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd arrives as a sweeping, confounding work-in-process. It’s full of quiet ruminations and loud interruptions; of visible seams and unhemmed edges, from the choir rehearsal that runs through its opening moments to the sound of the piano’s sustain pedal releasing at its end. Beauty—long Lana’s virtue and her burden—fades or is forgotten, like that titular tunnel, its mosaic ceilings and painted tiles sealed up and abandoned. Here, Lana is after something more enduring, the matters “at the very heart of things”: family, love, healing, art, legacy, wisdom—and all the contradictions and consternation that come along with the pursuit.