In June of 2014 I was 19, home from my freshman year of college. I was unemployed and spent many nights staying up past 3 or 4am listening to music in my mom's basement. This was a great time for rap and the typical basement jamming involved Main Attrakionz and Young Thug, but I was also listening to artists like Beach House, Mazzy Star, Galaxie 500, and my perennial favorite Cocteau Twins. I mention this because the dream-pop adoration really set me up to enjoy Ultraviolence.
Not following Lana Del Rey closely before this album, it was a surprising and awesome experience how much it grabbed me. I also found Lana's publicized depression surrounding the Born to Die (2012) backlash grounded and relatable. This was a really unique era in the first decade of social media when artists were subjected to a newer, overwhelming way of receiving unfiltered criticism, and the Guardian interview accompanying this album's release on June 13, 2014 revealed Lana as someone who didn't "enjoy being a pop star, [felt] constantly targeted by critics," and, most alarmingly, "[didn't] want to be alive at all." Ultraviolence, then, was a dramatic turn in every sense of the word: a theatrical display of intense sadness, an abandonment of the hip-hop pop of Born to Die and Paradise, and a uniformly striking collection of dark rock songs.
The Black Keys aren't too similar to the bands I mentioned in the first paragraph, but when you marry the rich, slow guitar atmosphere of Dan Auerbach's production with Lana's velvety voice, you get something of a scarred dream-pop revival, featuring classic pop references. "West Coast" rotates with tension before breaking into a slow-motion interpolation of Stevie Nicks' "Edge of Seventeen". "Ultraviolence" reworks The Crystals' "He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)" into twisted Kubrick worship. And fittingly, the album is cinematic in scope. Where Honeymoon (2015) and later albums portray a more chilled-out woman in her thirties, Ultraviolence is a stylized portrayal of youthful sadness. Her Americana-obsessed mythos, though it contains genuine roots, is thematically stretched out for show. This is how you end up with lyrics like "They think I don't understand the freedom land of the seventies... I'm churning out novels like beat poetry on amphetamines," ("Brooklyn Baby") or the (seemingly!) vapid "Sad Girl". But the results are ultimately bold, inventive and and personal songs that don't (or didn't) pander to any formula of commercial success (some of 2014's top hits: "Happy" by Pharrell; "Talk Dirty" by Jason Derulo; "All About That Bass" by Meghan Trainor).
Whereas newer LDR albums are (imo) overstuffed with stark ballads, Ultraviolence has a solid flow with elements that enhance the strength of her songwriting and singing instead of leaving them repetitively unadorned. The barest ballad here, the penultimate "Old Money", is gorgeous and welcomed after the hazy atmosphere of the preceeding tracks. Closing with a cover of "The Other Woman" is the album's final and most gracious nod to classic pop, and Lana's vocal performance on the song is stunning. Even the leftovers are worth seeking out: bonus track "Black Beauty" is a soaring torch song, and iTunes bonus track "Is This Happiness?" absolutely wrecks me (I wish this were on Spotify!).
In 2019, critical praise of Lana's music reached a high with the success of Norman Fucking Rockwell!, but Born to Die and Ultraviolence still strike me as her greatest albums. If you can't dig her, these albums likely won't change your mind more than anything else she's done since. But by leaning into her pain, Lana shone on Ultraviolence, and it stands as a unique peak in her career.
Listen to Ultraviolence here.
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