Everything Beautiful Is Doomed

By December 2011, Born to Die hadn’t come out yet but it already felt inevitable—Lana Del Rey had spent the autumn building a sadcore cathedral out of Video Games and everyone was waiting to see if the rest of the album would hold the ceiling up. It did. That particular blend of doomed glamour and slow-motion Americana, all swimming pools and ’60s girl-group ghost-voices, landed somewhere between homesick and just plain sick, and I listened to it for months in that particular way you listen to something you know isn’t good for you.