Every Track On Lana Del Rey's 'Ocean Blvd', Ranked
Yes, we're doing the ranking thing. For fun!
Obviously, we were both going to listen to the new Lana Del Rey album, Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd. We love to see her entering a Rhetorical Questions era!
But naturally we have questions of our own, as well as strong opinions and cascading tiers of preferences. Below, your JUDGEMENT contributors Eric Shorey and T. Bloom have ranked the album’s offerings in ways that you’ll probably disagree with, or maybe you’ll back out of reading this entirely. Thanks for clicking it anyway!
From ES:
God tier: A&W
S tier (Super/Special class): Peppers; Taco Truck x VB
A tier: Fishtail; Margaret
B tier: The Grants; Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd
C tier: Sweet; Judah Smith interlude; Fingertips
D tier: Paris, Texas
F tier: Kintsugi; Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing; Jon Batiste interlude
Trash tier: Candy Necklace; Let The Light In
What always drew me to Lana Del Rey was her preternatural ability to turn mopey, melodramatic, Bad Girl psychodrama into cunty pop songs. This whole neo-folk / psych-rock thing she’s been attempting is a total embarrassment, as far as I’m concerned. Things really took a turn for the worse post-Honeymoon, after which most of her songs got rid of the moody trap beats entirely, in favor of some ‘60s or ‘70s inspired, Bob Dylan-wannabe schlock.
Too much digital ink has been spilled about the art and artistry of Lana’s artifice, but I couldn’t care less about some insipid and erroneous binary of sincere vs ironic. I want bitchy bops about smoking cigarettes and being sad. Ocean Blvd, after years of waiting patiently, finally delivers on that—but only in a few spots. Lana goes back and forth between cloyingly heartfelt crooning and disinterested, shallow vamping. This time around, songs like “A&W,” “Peppers,” and “Taco Truck x VB” feel like they’re part of the Born to Die expanded cinematic universe, and thank god for that! I’ll take her cool vapidity over corny pianos, guitars and Father John Misty (🤮) any day. At least she knows what she’s doing—Lana finally seems fully in on the joke—to the point that the music has collapsed into hilariously self-aware self-parody: “Met my boyfriend down at the taco truck / Pass me my vape, I'm feelin' sick, I need to take a puff / Imagine if we actually gave a fuck / Wouldn't that be somethin' to talk about for us?”
From TB:
God tier: A&W
S tier: Peppers; Taco Truck x VB
A tier: Candy Necklaces; The Grants; Paris, Texas; Fingertips
B tier: Sweet; Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd; Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing; Fishtail
C tier: Jon Batiste interlude; Let The Light In; Margaret; Kintsugi
D tier:
F tier:
Trash tier: Judah Smith interlude
LDR is a terrific figure for Eric and me to co-critique, because we have very different tastes and musical priorities which occasionally overlap, and they’re all over the map in this particular artist’s discography. I’m much more into ballads, folk-style music, and lyrical close-reads, so there are mighty swaths of Lana’s output which have appealed to me in addition to the aforementioned Bad Girl psychodrama and moody trap beats, which I also relish.
But I’m not hanging on her every word the way I used to, and fortunately her output has been steady enough that I can pass on the stuff that isn’t for me, and wait for the next album. That’s how it came to pass with Chemtrails Over the Country Club and then the eagerly-awaited Blue Banisters (which I adored, and wrote extensively about upon its release).
That’s ultimately how I feel about Ocean Blvd, which contains a few tracks that I’d place among her best and most audacious — not just because of the callbacks to her bratty club persona and reluctant succubus tunes of yore, but also because of her willingness to break with traditional songwriting formats and dive fully into spiritual, stream of consciousness-style wanderings, as she does in “Fingertips.” And I appreciate all the callbacks to other songs and people she’s referenced in past albums, which helps Ocean Blvd feel like a continuation of this strange current of self-exploration she’s tapped into… but also, there are a lot of songs here that feel like drafts, which fail to break the skin with their pointy little teeth or reach the heart with their suffumigation of feelings.
Still, an impressive range of God-Tier through A-Level songs that will stick with me for some time! And then a massive range of middling material that strikes me as skippable, and the only unforgivable inclusion is that Judah Smith interlude, which strikes me as Kanye-esque in the worst possible way (including its excessive length), even if it was included ironically.
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