POP/ROCK

Lana Del Rey, "Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd" (Interscope)

"I wrote you a note, but I didn't send it," Del Rey sings on her ninth album, a 16-song, 78-minute collection as sprawling, hypnotic and incorrigibly American as an interstate highway. Many of the tracks have the run-on, handwritten feel of letters never mailed, and the piano ballad "Sweet" is addressed to a paramour who seems unwilling to go as deep as the 37-year-old singer.

More than any of its predecessors, this Del Rey album is about the very heart of things. Its themes and lyrical preoccupations are philosophical and weighty: the existence of God; the afterlife; the precise moment the soul leaves the body; the concessions of marriage and motherhood; fate; familial bonds; and, on the strikingly melancholy centerpiece "Fingertips," recent scientific progress into the attainment of eternal life. Throughout "Ocean Blvd," an artist who arrived on the scene sounding like a nihilist is now searching and self-scrutinizing.

Del Rey is occasionally at her best here, though "Ocean Blvd" is also marked by uneven pacing and occasional overindulgence. On an excellent four-song opening stretch, she establishes the album's unhurried pace and her connection to that fabled tunnel, a sealed-up, subterranean bit of West Coast architecture.

Part of the thrill of Del Rey's music is the sense that she can and will say absolutely anything, regardless of who it may offend. She makes a somewhat clumsy admission of her own white privilege on "Grandfather Please Stand on the Shoulders of My Father While He's Deep-Sea Fishing."

At this unfettered stage in her career, Del Rey's music is driven by a tension between freedom and structure; her greatest material finds its quivering equilibrium. Two six-minute compositions in the middle of the album, though, test the limits of Del Rey's penchant for free verse: "Kintsugi," an aching meditation on the deaths of several family members, and the drifting "Fingertips," which contains some of the record's most piercing lyrics.

A dozen years into her career, Del Rey has become a musical mermaid, capable of breathing as easily on the surface as she can in the ocean's darkest depths.

LINDSAY ZOLADZ, New York Times

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