“It’s happening”: Lana Del Rey is releasing a country album
Coquette girlies rejoice! Lana Del Rey just announced that her new album will be released September of this year. One slight hiccup? Del Rey’s upcoming Lasso will be on the country side of things, which means you’ve got exactly seven months to figure out how to incorporate plaid, cowboy hats and suede chaps into your bow-adorned outfits. While speaking to an audience at the Billboard x NMPA Songwriter Awards, the singer hinted that Lasso has been in the works for a while: “That’s why Jack has followed me to Muscle Shoals [in Alabama], Nashville, Mississippi, over the last four years”. The Jack she is referring to is, of course, Jack Antonoff, who first joined forces with Del Rey for her acclaimed sixth album Norman Fucking Rockwell!.
According to Del Rey, taking Lasso down the country route was kind of inevitable: “if you can’t already tell by our award winners and our performers, the music business is going country”. She’s not wrong. As well as time-tested favourites like Carrie Underwood and Kacey Musgraves, 2023 saw artists like Morgan Wallen catapulted into superstardom. Wallen even broke a world record when all 36 of the tracks on One Thing at a Time were in the Billboard Hot 100 at once. Amongst the other artists that have successfully pivoted to the genre is none other than Madonna, who slipped into a Canadian tuxedo and tried out some acoustic stylings for her 2000 album Music. There have been less successful segues into getting all country bumpkin – actor Steve Martin’s efforts being one of them – but that’s an article for another day.
For eagle-eyed fans of Del Rey, the country slant of Lasso probably isn’t too much of a surprise. Last month she even popped in a little excerpt of a song called “Henry”, tagging country producer Luke Laird, who’s a frequent collaborator of both Kacey Musgraves and Carrie Underwood. And whether you’re a country fan or not, it’s unlikely that Del Rey will do a disservice to the genre. The news of Lasso comes at a time when the singer just broke a world record of her own: as of this week, her album “Born to Die” has spent a whole decade on the Billboard 200.
