So what's with the hold-up, Lana? Oh she's just... vibing

The mysterious album has been renamed, delayed and is yet to drop. But the patron saint of romantic love, Lana Del Rey, is on a schedule of her own intuition

- Hannah Ewens

“I’ve always gone with my gut,” Lana Del Rey told me back in 2023, during the promotion of her ninth album Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. Her label is well aware of that fact. “If I feel like the timing isn’t right or I don’t feel like some kind of situation or plan is right, they’ve always backed me 100 per cent.” Something you should know about Del Rey is that she lives and works according to the flow of life, wherever and whenever divine inspiration strikes. All this to say, her much delayed, renamed, country to Americana to probably-a-bit-country-or-Americana 10th album might not be ready.

It wasn’t ready when she announced it as Lasso at the Billboard and NMPA Songwriter Awards in January 2024. It wasn’t ready eight months later when it was originally due for release. Neither was it ready when it morphed from Lasso into The Right Person Will Stay, and was given a new scheduled release date of May 2025. It very possibly wasn’t even ready this summer when rumours suggested that production hadn’t properly started, that she was focused on her first full stadium tour, and that crucially her and her favourite producer Jack Antonoff’s schedules had not yet aligned.

Does the fact that Del Rey just dropped a snippet of “track 13” on Instagram mean the other 12 plus tracks are done? Maybe, maybe not. What it does propose, besides a possible Ethel Cain-related side-quest, is a collaboration with Antonoff, who is tagged in the caption, which seems to confirm that fans can expect an Antonoff special, aka the sonic balladic blueprint of the majority of her best albums.