Lana Del Rey keeps it real with a stadium show that gets a little weird
The night LDR became a hologram, cried and covered John Denver
PRINCIPALITY STADIUM, CARDIFF, 23 JUNE 2025: On her first UK stadium tour, no one will care that Lana Del Rey’s new, tenth album remains unreleased, but fuck me, that’s wild, isn’t it!? Lasso, as it was once called, was originally due in November 2024. Then May 2025, as The Right Person Will Stay. On 11 April, Del Rey posted a video on Instagram: “You know it’s not going to come on time, right? Should I even tell you that the name changed again?” A few tracks have been released since, presumably to feature on what Lana has called her first country album, but nothing further on the name, and no third release date.
Lana Del Rey has a history of poor time management, but not one of lethargy. She grafted hard under various names before becoming LDR, and since blowing up with her second album, Born To Die (her debut as Lana, self-titled but spelt Lana Del Ray, was pulled from circulation soon after its digital release in 2010), she’s given us 7 more albums, songs for movies, a spoken word record and a book of poetry. A slob she ain’t, but deadlines have proven to be overly ambitious or impossible more than once. Chemtrails Over the Country Club was delayed by a year; a 2020 Christmas Day album of American standards is still God knows where; Lana’s 2023 Glastonbury performance had its plug pulled due to her arriving 30 minutes late on stage because she hadn’t fixed her hair. She turned that particular moment into pure theatre, performing her opening tracks whilst her stylist finished the job in front of 40,000 people. More dubious was the story of how the laptop containing her second poetry book was stolen from her car. She wiped the contents remotely, although wouldn’t that have meant she could have downloaded herself a copy of it before deleting it forever?
The elasticity of truth has worked wonders for Del Rey, who’s also talked of re-releasing her lost debut. But where’s the fun in that? No, Lana Del Ray is much more romantic and mythological (two pillars of everything this woman is) if it’s kept locked away and shared between fans via bootleg rips and dodgy vinyl pressings. Drama and suspense is to Lana Del Rey fans what bitchy bravado is to Charli XCX’s and valedictorian energy is to Taylor Swift’s. If one of the major league pop girlies was going to play Wembley Stadium next week having not released their new album in time, it was going to be Lana Del Rey, although I’ll admit that I was surprised when she announced Wembley, and again when she needed to add a second night. As she opened this run of massive shows in Cardiff last night, I was less thinking ‘but what’s she going to play?’, more ‘how does pop music this weird feel on a scale this big?’. The short answer is, pretty weird.