Lasso is dead; long live The Right Person Will Stay
This week on Instagram, Lana del Rey announced a new album The Right Person Will Stay, which will be released on May 21, 2025. On the one hand, it’s frustrating that we’re going to have to wait so long to hear it, but on the other, the end of May is exactly the right time for a new Lana release: next summer just got a lot more sultry. Forget doing a little key, doing a little line: 2025 is all about staring wistfully across an Oklahoma prairie, sipping on a glass of sweet tea as a coyote howls in the distance and you recall the cowboy who broke your heart so many years ago. Even if you live in Bromley.
So what do we know about the album? Not a huge amount so far, but the album art is promising. We know from past experience that the more eccentric and low-effort her cover art is, the better the music – remember, for example, the black-and-white selfie that accompanied “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have”. So the cover of The Right Person Will Stay – which manages to look at once like a wedding photo and an order-of-service booklet for her own funeral – suggests an incoming classic. It’s also her first record since she got married to her alligator-taming husband, which surely will be a rich source of artistic inspiration – are any of us ready for a Lana who is finally happy in love? Here’s everything else we were able to clobber together from a brief Instagram caption and her previous remarks.
IT’S NOT LASSO
For a while, Lana’s tenth studio album was supposed to be a country and western record called Lasso, which would draw influence from artists like Patsy Cline and Hank Williams, and maybe even see her riding horses on stage, but she has recently gone off that idea. In October, she told Vogue Italia that she was reconsidering the project. “There was a lot of ‘American flair’, too much of that very American aesthetic,” she says. “I stopped because I didn’t recognise myself. I would like this album to be a reflection of the person I am today,” she said. Instead, she suggested, the album might become more “southern gothic”.
In a follow-up interview with People magazine, she explained that she doesn’t want the album to feel “half-cooked.” She said, “I think all the songs have been Americana and I want to wait to see what the musical atmosphere feels like. I usually feel like I need a pause in the creation process, but if there’s a literal energetic pause that almost feels physical, then I have to wait and I don’t know why.” If some artists were talking like this, you might think they were just being lazy (shut up about “energetic pauses” and get back to the damn studio!), but Lana is nothing if not prolific. She probably had an album’s worth of great songs ready to go, but she’s not going to release something unless it feels exactly right – a commitment to quality control which bodes well for The Right People Stay.
SHE’S WORKING WITH SOME FAMILIAR NAMES
As her Instagram revealed, Lana has been working with Drew Erickson, who co-produced Blue Bannisters and Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, ‘Zach’ (almost certainly the musician Zach Dawes, who has worked as a producer and a songwriter on a number of songs across her last few albums) and, of course, long-term collaborator Jack Antonoff.
It’s become fashionable to slag off Jack Antanoff these days, but you can’t deny that he and Lana have a uniquely generative partnership. “A&W”? “Tulsa Jesus Freak”? “Mariners Apartment Complex”? “Venice Bitch”? Say what you like about his work elsewhere, but together the pair have banged out masterpiece after masterpiece.
IT’S GOING TO FEATURE HENRY, COME ON
“Happy for you to hear a few songs coming up before Stagecoach,” Lana wrote, referring to the California festival she is due to headline next April. This will include “Henry”, a song which she previously released a snippet of on Instagram in January 2024, and which has already become a fan favourite. It is produced by the country producer and songwriter Luke Laird, who she also mentioned in the album announcement yesterday. Featuring finger-picked acoustic guitars and opening with the lyrics “I mean Henry, come on/ Do you think I’d really choose it / All this off and on/ Henry, come on”, it is a gentle and downbeat slice of Americana.
IT’S GOING TO BE RELEASED ON THE FIVE YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF ‘QUESTION FOR THE CULTURE’
May 21, 2020, the day Lana posted her infamous “question for the culture” on Instagram, was a rough time to be a Lanatic. It’s not that the point she was making was unreasonable in itself: she was objecting to being criticised for “glamourising abuse” on account of her “minor lyrical exploration detailing my sometimes submissive or passive roles in my relationships”, which is fair enough. Women should be able to write about messy, imperfect relationships without being vilified for setting back the cause of feminism. It wasn’t a great look, however, that most of the artists she listed as counter-examples to her own (including Beyonce, Cardi B and Doja Cat) were women of colour, and that she appeared to be criticising them for having number one songs “about being sexy, wearing no clothes, f—ing, cheating, etc”. She later clarified that she admired the singers in question and wasn’t trying to criticise them, but the ensuing backlash became one of her biggest controversies yet. If you’re a public figure, you ideally don’t ever want to be in the position where you are forced to say, “don’t ever ever ever call me racist”.
The Right Person Will Stay is due to be released exactly five years after this fateful day. Maybe this is just a coincidence, or maybe she’s finally come up with an answer to her own question.