There aren’t many days anymore when the anticipation of a new song fills me with joy, obsessively pressing replay as I try to soak in new details. Forget new albums. Those will always have some value of discovery. The single is often something more methodical, often crouching in the bushes waiting for the perfect moment to be released. It could be argued that, for a larger society, that day was when Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” dropped after an unprecedented weekend of beef tracks that delivered some of the most memorable disses in rap history. Outside of that, it’s hard to say anyone is making music that hits the radar and automatically makes me think, “I’ll never forget this.”
I think it’s telling that Lana Del Rey has been my favorite artist for roughly 13 years now, yet I haven’t been inspired to do deep dives on a lot of her marketing. That isn’t to say I played “Henry, Come On” or “Bluebird” ad nauseam, but neither of those necessarily had enough depth for me to want to dig and better understand their function. To me, they’re very quaint country-tinged ballads that were enhanced by live performances at her Stagecoach gig. Not only that, but momentum was dying as their back-to-back April 2025 release was met with the will they/won’t they news of her new album being delayed.
Several name changes later, and “Stove” remains on a TBD schedule. Much like A$AP Rocky with “Don’t Be Dumb,” I choose to believe she’s fine-tuning the record, reportedly adding six more personal tracks to the mix. Along with a breakdown of how vinyl pressing takes time, it’s easy to achieve impatience for a record that was going to be the album of the summer, then fall, then winter, and now… who knows. The most we’ve gotten in that time is a hilariously understated feud with Ethel Cain and the wildest fight to be “the most famous girl at The Waffle House.” Even her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff has produced nearly 100 songs by Taylor Swift since Del Rey last dropped an album.
The latest song caught me by surprise. I had expectations for what “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” would sound like, given her proposed country direction… and I was completely wrong. Everything from the timing to the style made me think that Del Rey loves winking at her audience, zigging when we expect zagging and creating a love ballad that feels like the schloshed cousin of the triumphant epic “A&W.” While it was off by a matter of days, even the near Valentine’s Day premiere (her latest had to settle for Mardi Gras) can’t help but leave me nostalgic for the first time I heard, “I haven’t done a cartwheel since I was nine,” unaware that I was about to hear her most hallucinatory single, possibly ever. Despite approaching eight minutes, I listened to it seven times in a row that day.
The thing I love most about modern Lana Del Rey is that she’s never been more confident as an artist. There is no sense that she needs to please anyone, so her music has become more personal, diving into atmospheric oddities and increasingly bizarre metaphors that have always been there, but often in a quieter, parodic fashion. Even the title “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” would’ve been a joke people made five years ago. Nowadays, she just leans into it and makes music where she sounds genuinely happy and profoundly loopy, evolving from her nostalgic roots intoa nuanced deconstruction of the role she fantasized about in the days of “Born to Die.” Having turned 40 last June, this is what Del Rey settling down looks like.
Despite being one of pop’s most celebrated artists, even earning a shoutout from Swift at The Grammys, she’s never seemed like a conventional star. Nowhere is this clearer than in the accompanying music video, which feels closer to repurposed home videos loosely tied together by choreography that Del Rey only seems interested in singing along to for less than 20 seconds. There’s an artificial snow machine in the backyard spliced with footage of her wandering around the modest abode. When the song suggests she’s not a good cook (the first noticeable tie-in to “Stove” as a title), she’s in the kitchen. She even sticks her head in the oven, reminding listeners of her older “24/7 Sylvia Plath” line. There are visits to the garage and the central tractor that opens the song. Meanwhile, her boyfriend, who inspired the song title, wanders like a Pazuzu edit in The Exorcist (1973) while never in focus. Even as the video breaks the fourth wall, the lingering shot finds him completely in shadow. It’s an odd, lo-fi detail and likely one to tease fans. There’s even the incorporation of footage from old Betty Boop era cartoons, including a character turning into a ghost. For a love song, it’s visually antagonistic.
Then again, the production is not any more formal. Much like her work with Antonoff on “A&W,” the joy of discovering this song is taking in the idiosyncrasies. Beyond lyrics that seem intent on mixing homely behavior with familiar raucous callbacks, there’s a production that seemingly comes out of nowhere, forcing the listener to ask, “Is this a joke?” Like most of Del Rey’s best, it’s only true in the sense that she’s grown bored with conventions and desperately needs to obliterate structure. What results may be a lot subtler than her Valentine’s Day gift, but arguably more exciting for how haphazardly it glues together so many novelties.
If I knew one detail leading up to my first listen, it was an observation that parts of it felt reminiscent of Disney princess songs. That’s enough to raise some eyebrows, though I wasn’t ready for how that was. To first focus on the vocals, the chorus finds her reaching for the higher end of her register, at times sounding like Betty Boop huffing a helium balloon. This is what happens when a 1920s cartoon gets into a studio booth in 2026. You get jazz-level scatting like, “Whoopsie-daisy yoohoo!” rhyming with “Positively voodoo” and “I love you.” The jerkiness of speeding up and slowing down is absolutely infectious, especially as her tonal nature clashes with more contemporary ideas like “Put it on my ass, no-tan-lines summer.” If nothing else, the vocals are some of her most versatile, feeling like a self-penned musical based around flipping through channels at midnight while drunk and getting all of America’s indulgence clashing with biography.
And then there’s the orchestration. Given that “Stove” has been sold as Lana Del Rey’s country record, it’s hard to buy “White Feather” as fitting those conventions. Even Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter,” which incorporated hip-hop and R&B with the twang, felt more noticeably reverent for the form. That isn’t to say this is lacking signifiers, but as a collective work, I hear a wider array of influences. It’s also classified under alternative country, which I think is interesting only in that I have to assume this is where the art freaks of the genre hang out, luring listeners in with more conventional orchestration before letting ideas fly loose. These are, admittedly, not as rock-oriented as “A&W,” but I can’t imagine Patsy Cline using the same instruments and getting the same results.
What follows is a rambunctious reimagining of the form that honestly doesn’t make sense. Most people striving for Top 40 permanence wouldn’t think to use high-pitched vocals belting nonsense. Not only that, but Antonoff and Drew Erickson have created one of the most befuddling musical choices of modern pop. While the vocals by themselves would be enough to bulge out your eyes, the background strings are something else. This isn’t operatic. If anything, the pitch and production come more from the world of ballet, reminiscent of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. It’s elegance over grandeur, as if Del Rey is supposed to be imagined dancing in a tutu across a stage. If I had to wager a guess, it’s the implicit mocking of women’s place in patriarchal designs where she’s a cartoonish housewife from a bygone era doing everything to please her audience, while the discordant nature recognizes how much it doesn’t fit with the modern era.
In my opinion, the strings are infectious. Again, I’m hedging bets that part of the reason this album has taken so long has to do with fine-tuning details like this. Had the harmonies been deeper or fuller, there’s a good chance that the impact would be missing. The effort instead creates something both nostalgic and hallucinatory, hiding complex details that encourage listeners to keep going deeper, finding clues for who the real Lana Del Rey is. Given that she has always identified the role as a character, this may be her most playful mix of artifice and realism yet. It’s downright cartoonish, but that’s the point.
It’s an odd pivot from her prior two established singles for “Stove.” Those are comparatively button-up, capturing a sound everyone would expect from a country record driven by guitar and deep personal lyrics. Given that there are excerpts of other songs floating around, it’s hard to know what the final product will sound like. All that I know is that “Ocean Boulevard” felt cinematic, a flowing journey of ideas that were meticulously designed and pushed her further into greater artistry. There were even recordings of sermons used to establish the atmosphere. One can imagine that Del Rey is continuing to play with what her records can achieve, though I’m not sure I have any answers.
More than the simple exclamation points that pop up when I see a new Lana Del Rey song is coming out, is finding the real standouts. “White Feather” may be another anomaly in a career that is often more challenging on a lyric level, but I’m hopeful that “Stove” is going to continue expanding her willingness to indulge ribaldry, enhancing a track with a vocal range that has felt more reserved in the past decade. This is a winking recognition that not all love songs have to be pretty and delicate. They can sometimes be better described by words like hootenanny. I’m unsure if this will have the longevity on my favorites list as “A&W,” but it’s nice to know she’s only grown less serious as time passes.
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