I’ll spare you the “it me” jokes: this is a real earworm, and if a Lana Del Rey song called “High By The Beach” appeals to you in theory, then it’s high-by-the-beach time you got involved. Tighter, plainer, more melodically dynamic and more aesthetically coherent than anything Lana Del Rey’s released off her forthcoming album Honeymoon so far, this is a ketamine kiss-off with a fairly simple concept (as says the chorus: All I wanna do is get high by the beach, get high by the beach, get high) and one of those particular Lana explications of a retro, co-dependent, hall-of-mirrors motel relationship:
Boy, look at you looking at me/ I know you don’t understand
You could be a bad motherfucker/ but that don’t make you a man
Now you’re just another/ one of my problems/ because you got out of hand
We won’t survive/ we’re sinking into the sand
And this sound has her back in a sweet spot, too: an old-fashioned fake book chord pattern, slightly acidified and uneasily sweetened, transposed to fit over a new frame—the ticking beat that just barely skitters, the synth bleeping, the organ in the back going insane. Honeymoon is out in September, and here’s your bootleg upload below:
