Lana Del Rey’s sixth album, ‘Chemtrails Over the Country Club,’ dials down on instrumental grandiosity in favor of more intimate moments. It carries the spirit of Americana while maintaining the romantic melodrama found in her best work.

While her former works channel the respective coasts of America, Del Rey’s sixth album seems to enjoy the heartland’s isolated heat and heartbeat, taking listeners deeper into her vision of the country. Distinctively, the shade found under redwoods and grand oak trees embraced. She narrates life as a waitress, muses over zodiac signs and domestic life, praises Jesus, and demonstrates a little twang. 

‘Chemtrails’ is generous in that each song embodies something else – functioning like a catalog of periods from the past or present and seeming like a melancholy reimagining of long-forgotten sentiments. 

“Wild at Heart” is a portrait of the character of Lana Del Rey in a consolidated perspective that seemingly blends NFR’s “How to Disappear” and “Love Song.” It’s a dreamy and wandering acceptance of her faults. 

The opener “White Dress” introduces sparse drumming and unique head-voice, bringing a slow-developing collection of momentary justifications and memories. The track feels like it expands on a never-ending horizon with a tiny diner as the only disruption but moves past to the transient city of Orlando. 

“Breaking up Slowly” rules off its options and presents a beautiful duet with Nikki Lane. While laying the truth bare, the song encounters disappointment and the freedom of not knowing. 

Lana has a sort of reckoning with higher powers throughout the album. In the refrain of “White Dress” singing, “It made me feel like a God,” a lot of “contemplating god” in the title track, “Chemtrails Over the Country Club,” and in “Tulsa Jesus Freak,” bowing down for an evangelical spectacle, lifted to heaven through the wings of shimmering auto-tune. 

However, foremost than the most high is Lana. As an avatar for wild American beauty, she sounds divine. ‘Chemtrails’ confronts and embodies the pleasure of living with lavish privilege. She stares with widened eyes at the lines veining across the sky. Whether or not Del Rey believes in covert geo-engineering is not the point. She writes a narrative that provides substantive dreamworlds to a life that would spiral without them. Although the album meanders from place to place, the vision is narrow and focused, and once again, Lana embraces her distinctly American inheritance.