(Credit: Neil Krug)
Tue 30 December 2025 23:00, UK
Lana Del Rey has always felt more in touch with the past than the present. “I wasn’t even born in the ’50s, but I feel like I was there,” she once famously claimed.
It’s more than obvious by now that Del Rey’s back catalogue is inspired by a decadent dose of sophistication. It’s all glitz, glamour, and classic Hollywood enthral packaged into 21st-century alternative pop. The possible influences within this are clearly many and massive, but perhaps the last person you might expect to enter into that fray is Kurt Cobain.
This is not to say that Cobain couldn’t be glamorous in his own distinct way – it’s just that his version of that ideal involved a bit more grit, grunge, and overall rock and roll exploits than the porcelain doll image which Del Rey likes to portray. Yet even still, much like the rest of the world, that never stopped her from fawning over the Nirvana mastermind.
“When I was 11, I saw Kurt Cobain singing ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ on MTV and it really stopped me dead in my tracks,” Del Rey once explained. “I thought he was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. Even at a young age, I really related to his sadness.”
Clearly, it was this well of melancholia that struck the more tonal chord than the basis of the notes themselves, but it’s also evident that this sense has stayed strong within Del Rey ever since Cobain first graced her screen almost three decades ago. When you start comparing this to a selection of her own thematic muses, from heavenly Hollywood stars to celestial bodies, suddenly their separate universes seem much more entwined, after all.
It was perhaps symbolic through everything that ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ came from Nirvana’s seminal third album, In Utero, famously adorned on its cover by a body with lavish angel wings. In terms of the song itself, there doesn’t seem to be much similarity to Del Rey’s own work on the surface, unless I’ve happened to miss her attempt at immortalising children with terminal cancer into song.
But nevertheless, somewhere between the shock of the sentiment, Cobain’s own striking looks, and the depth of sadness never truly captured in mainstream music prior to that moment, that pivotal performance of ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ lit a spark in Del Rey by encapsulating everything she suddenly saw her future mapped out to be.
The more you come to think about it, if there ever were hypothetically to be a grunge reimagining of a Del Rey hit like ‘Young and Beautiful’, Cobain might just have been the perfect match to take on the challenge. This wasn’t because he was ever overly affected or romantic, but because he knew intrinsically what it meant to be secretly wasting away under the facade of glamour.
Naturally, this puts a very sombre slant on a life and legacy that should be remembered for far more than just its tragic episodes, but this is also the mark of what Del Rey has always set out to cultivate as an artist. Everyone knows that life isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but it takes an intuitive soul to look beneath the surface and turn real pain into beauty. Somewhere across those vast sonic chasms, that’s where she and Cobain so briefly crossed paths.
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