Say the name Lana Del Rey and a particular image of the United States materialises: one of rusted trucks and faded flags, a waitress curling her hair before the breakfast shift, the smell of petrol in the heat, the hum of late-night television in a room where no one is really watching. For more than a decade, despite being from New York City, the singer has been the patron saint of small-town melancholy, the US’s emblem of heartbreak. Somewhere along the way, she gained a new congregation: Republicans. Or at least the kind of wistful traditionalists who do not mind being labelled as such.
So perhaps it is perfect that her next album is called Stove, a title so plain it feels almost revolutionary in a world allergic to sincerity.
While other pop stars go big and glitzy, naming their albums things like The Life of a Showgirl, Brat or Radical Optimism, Del Rey, never afraid to go against the grain, has gone full kitchen appliance. Stove clangs with the sturdy, unpretentious weight of real life – just look at the title of the forthcoming album’s new single. Released on Tuesday, White Feather-Hawk Tail Deer Hunter sounds more like an advertisement for Bass Pro Shops than a pop song.
Naturally, critics have been searching for irony. Is she mocking the “tradwives”? Commenting on capitalism? Is it all, somehow, a feminist statement? There has been the inevitable liberal backlash. Social media users lined up to express their horror that a woman might name an album after a household object. “You really doubled down on ‘feminism isn’t interesting to me’ with that title,” one commenter wrote, capturing the general tone of panic. Others concluded that it must be a Sylvia Plath reference. The American poet, you know, who died by putting her head in a stove. The idea that a pop star could find poetry in the domestic, or beauty in the ordinary, was apparently too much to bear for some.
But Del Rey is not mocking or moralising. She is doing something far riskier: being sincere – something that now seems to qualify as a political act, and something that definitely codes Right. She is married to an alligator-tour guide from the South named Jeremy Dufrene and lives in a modest Louisiana home he built himself – a detail so quaint it feels like a joke, except it is not.