I’ve always gone with my gut,” Lana Del Rey told me back in 2023, during the promotion of her ninth album Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. Her label is well aware of that fact. “If I feel like the timing isn’t right or I don’t feel like some kind of situation or plan is right, they’ve always backed me 100 per cent.” Something you should know about Del Rey is that she lives and works according to the flow of life, wherever and whenever divine inspiration strikes. All this to say, her much delayed, renamed, country to Americana to probably-a-bit-country-or-Americana 10th album might not be ready.
It wasn’t ready when she announced it as Lasso at the Billboard and NMPA Songwriter Awards in January 2024. It wasn’t ready eight months later when it was originally due for release. Neither was it ready when it morphed from Lasso into The Right Person Will Stay, and was given a new scheduled release date of May 2025. It very possibly wasn’t even ready this summer when rumours suggested that production hadn’t properly started, that she was focused on her first full stadium tour, and that crucially her and her favourite producer Jack Antonoff’s schedules had not yet aligned.
Does the fact that Del Rey just dropped a snippet of “track 13” on Instagram mean the other 12 plus tracks are done? Maybe, maybe not. What it does propose, besides a possible Ethel Cain-related side-quest, is a collaboration with Antonoff, who is tagged in the caption – which seems to confirm that fans can expect an Antonoff special, aka the sonic balladic blueprint of the majority of her best albums.
Then again, many fans believe “track 13” is an old song from 2022. Either way, Del Rey woke up, drove across the city of Los Angeles and decided to soundtrack her emotional weather system with a minute-long teaser, filmed on front camera. Yes, we get a lot of Del Rey updates like this and no, we don’t know what’s going on. It feels appropriate, anyway, for her, for the culture, for the way we consume information: these days it all plays out minute by minute, mood to mood.
Album releases were once carefully choreographed events. Something we could rely on. Fans knew the drill: release date, lead single, pre-orders. Then, in 2016, Beyoncé dropped Lemonade out of nowhere, effectively changing the rules of music marketing. Taylor Swift doubled down on that energy during the pandemic, rolling out two albums in 2020 with almost no warning.
The more the element of surprise is used as a tactic by bigger artists, the more everyone has to pivot like it’s a line dance. So, delays? They’re less about the joy of spontaneity and more about calculation – politics, money, who might be launching what and when. Release dates often live in this nebulous zone until the last possible moment, dictated by chart battles and an unspoken truce between artists who don’t want their crossover fanbases having to play Sophie’s choice.
But this dance – Del Rey’s – feels different. It’s a saunter, a sunny game. As Nell, who runs the fan account, Lana Del Rey England, says, “The delay is just so Lana.” She’s not an empire like Swift, sprinting off stage from the Eras tour to announce a new album, just a year after the last. Nor is she someone like Charli XCX, who will release another record alongside 10 unrelated projects because she exists perpetually in innovation and expansion. Lana Del Rey is just… vibing.
The fact that the industry has come to operate in this way is only beneficial to an intuitive artist like Del Rey who works entirely on impulse. In January 2024, she caught the charming idea of a country album called Lasso, and then let it go just as easily. When she was blissfully married, The Right Person Will Stay seemed just the thing. But then, she smiled and addressed fans knowingly, saying, “Should I even tell you that the name changed again? Maybe I’ll wait.” It’s amusing, even to her, how plans come together and change so fluidly.
Still, as much as we can forget them when it comes to Del Rey, material realities do matter. They’re part of what going with the flow is all about. For Antonoff, always the intended producer for this album, 2024 was booked and busy. He had a significant album release and touring year with his own band Bleachers, following his own rising star. Newly married life had begun with Margaret Qualley, and according to sources, he spent much of his remaining limited time on Kendrick Lamar’s surprise album GNX. In 2025, he worked on Sabrina Carpenter’s imminent release Man’s Best Friend, and besides a few other single production credits, presumably the months of July, August and possibly September had been earmarked time for Del Rey’s album, post her stadium tour.
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I doubt that his business would’ve been an inconvenience for anyone, certainly not Del Rey, who famously had more important things than recording on her mind. Or, as she put it to reporters in September 2024 around the time she got married: “I was looking to get married – not have a 10th record! But like I said, it really is on God’s time and things just come when they come.”
When she first announced the album in January of last year, she was not yet dating her husband. He was referred to as “my guy” in May, which is when they reportedly connected romantically (they had met years prior). By September they had obtained a marriage license. Whether she’d started writing the album before they started dating is besides the point – she’d have been inspired to rethink the entire endeavour regardless. Life was happening for an autobiographical artist and she couldn’t write it until she’d lived it.
When the album does come out, it won’t be the album anyone was expecting, including her. It’s more exciting this way. Because Lasso existed for enough time that we could all imagine it in full; Lana using her lower register against a pedal steel guitar, mythologising the cowboy in her lyrics. The singles that are supposedly attached to this album, the full-bodied address of “Henry, Come On” and the quaint sing-song of “Bluebird”, were enough to suggest the more Americana lilt of the album in development. Who knows whether these songs she debuted at live shows this year even make the cut.
What does feel like a sure thing, perhaps the only sure thing, is that the new album will be about her husband. I imagine it will be something like the swelling love song “Stars Fell on Alabama” that she performed at Stagecoach this year, but has yet to get an official release. There’s a sense, to me at least, that Del Rey’s catalogue up until now is an oeuvre about unattainable, complicated love. Now it feels like she’s reached the height of her powers professionally speaking, married to someone who embodies the masculine, rooted energy she dreamed of, far outside of the ego-centred entertainment industry, all the way in Alabama.
This is a new era for the patron saint of romance. What do songs sound like when the person who has made high art out of relationship pain is living a love so incredibly straightforward and grounded? What happens to Lana Del Rey: The Artist when the longing is sated?
Of course this is all speculation. But for fans (and for Del Rey), the waiting and the wistful speculating are central to her lore, and to the lived aesthetic. Choosing to be a part of her extended universe means accepting delays not just as possibilities, but as moods – a way of being. And so while other fanbases might have been frustrated to the point of posting memes and mockery, hers has accepted that this campaign rollout is the most Lana chapter yet. A long sigh stretched over years. “When’s it gonna be my turn?” A girl, in a field, forever almost arriving.
