Down on the West Coast

West Coast moves like someone pressed a thumb against the record—that deliberate, humid drag in the tempo, the guitar figure that sounds like heat shimmering off a desert highway. Lana Del Rey was about to release Ultraviolence, her third album and the one where the drowsy sadness that had always lived at the edge of her music became its entire architecture. Dan Auerbach co-produced and you can hear it: the thing breathes differently from anything she’d done before. I listened to it on a gray afternoon and felt briefly like I was somewhere with better weather and worse decisions.