The Summer That Won’t Turn

Summertime Sadness came out in summer 2012, when Born to Die was still new enough to feel like a discovery, and it did something the album’s more theatrical tracks didn’t—it lodged itself and refused to leave. The arrangement is restrained for Lana Del Rey: piano, slow strings, a compressed beat, and that voice sitting in the reverb like it’s been there for decades. Nominally it’s about someone who doesn’t come back from summer the way you expected, but it works better as a feeling than a story—that specific dread of a season beginning to turn, something already gone before you can name what it was.