Marcel Winatschek

Lana at the Edge of Everything

Brooklyn Baby arrived that summer like a postcard from someone cooler than you. Lana Del Rey—who we’d been calling "Die Lippe," the Lip, with a mix of affection and mockery for years—put out a song that sounded like every romanticized version of New York you’d ever assembled from films and records and secondhand stories. Vintage reverb, lazy guitar, that particular Lana trick of making nostalgia feel like it belongs to you even when it doesn’t.

The song came ahead of Ultraviolence, her Dan Auerbach-produced third album, which leaned harder into the doomed glamour she’d been perfecting since Born to Die. Where that record could feel overwrought, Ultraviolence felt genuinely menacing in places—quieter, more resigned, less interested in your approval. Brooklyn Baby didn’t quite fit the album’s mood, but that was fine. It existed in its own weather.

She played the Zitadelle Spandau in Berlin that summer—an actual medieval citadel, which is either the most on-brand venue imaginable for Lana Del Rey or so obvious it loops back around to perfect. I remember the idea of it being almost funny. The moat. The ramparts. Die Lippe, in a flower crown, singing about James Dean.