Review: Lana Del Rey’s ‘White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter’

Waiting for a new Lana Del Rey single to drop is perhaps the most excruciating waiting game in the history of mankind. You learn the art of patience and the value of self-restraint. But, once a new track is out and your headphones are on, it’s like experiencing the first drop of spring water. Or, like lying in a warm pile of fresh laundry. 

In ‘White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter, Lana delivers a red-hot, sultry and nostalgic vantage point on her domestic life. I’ve been a fan of Lana since before the release of Born To Die, and was 14 when she published the historical artefact that is now commonly referred to as the ‘Ultraviolence’ music video. In a 2020 interview, Lana discussed her own perception of her musical resonance with young women through her songwriting. It made me think about the connection I have with her music, its significance in my own life, and what fascinates me so much about her lyricism. Maybe one day it will be my PhD as. I’d certainly have enough to say. Her records, tracks and written poetry (‘LA Who Am I To Love You’) all illustrate memories far too lived in - like a black cat, on its eighth life. 

For a fan's ear, ‘White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter’ feels like a valley between certain points of Lana’s career - but in a way of humility and comfort. I feel that Lust For Life, albeit not my favourite album, is a pivotal moment in Lana’s sonic development. She speaks of moving “out of the black, into the blue" - and her sound does just that, maturing beautifully on the 4 records that follow. In this latest single, the folky shards of pizzicato, prominent on her more recent works, marry the simmering, orchestral intensities we encountered through our first love Born To Die. It’s the perfect kaleidoscope - and I expected nothing less. 

Constantly on the cusp of self-realisation, sometimes nailed to the floor by a sensibility for loss (which is exactly what I love, don’t get me twisted! ‘Blue Banisters’ I’m looking at you…) - this record consciously removes itself from that pattern. It settles into the mundanity of her everyday living, happily co-existing with a romance “Like a bird in the heart, like a sparrow”. For the first time in her writing, this romance doesn’t contradict or compromise her sense of self. Her recounting of ‘loss’ becomes kinetic and independent, a philosophy that develops most prominently on Honeymoon. She plays off her melancholy in a metamorphosis, and chooses happiness. She’s carved a life with no trade offs - which did once exist, as on ‘Pawn Shop Blues’ - or at the provocative centres of albums like Ultraviolence. Nothing dims the intensity she brings on the vocals, production or writing here. 

The lyrics bring us into a world of imitative harmonies - Lana rallies our senses and chants us back into the “the dark (snap), snap, crackle, pop, tch,”, a kind of omen. Co-written by sister Chuck and husband Jeremy, its cinematic quality is accompanied by some paradoxical imagery. , tThe track title itself: innocence, purity, prey - happily wed to the vulturine, the predator. There aren’t many works that achieve this preternatural and sensual hybrid, but as expected, it’s all very Lynchian and very, very, very Hitchcock. It’s what I imagine the new Mrs. De Winter would sing to Maxim on the Manderley estate. Having said that, if we listen closely enough to this track, we’re not being introduced to a singular type of iconography or idea, as is commonly mistaken with her work. We’ve moved from “The television static was quite overwhelming” types of lines (ideas and themes which listeners pinned as her take on social positioning/responsibility) to frequent iPhone mentions and sticking “with picking daisies for Instagram”. We’re at the nucleus of shifting contemporary culture in her music, contradicted by a voice that evokes nostalgia. She weaves in her signature playfulness, “Whoopsie-daisy, yoo-hoo, yelling, ‘I love you’... dinner's almost done’”. What was once assessed as ill lyrical equipment for a meaningful artistic persona - limp and submissive - is now a musician considered by many critics to be the greatest American songwriter of the 21st century. It’s only now that these former assessments feel merely like the conundrums and symptoms of a developing legacy, and a woman misunderstood for a large proportion of her career. 

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Of all artists, Lana is considerably the reigning savant songwriter of what I can only call a ‘bone marrow’ kind of infatuation. Whimsy is written all over this track from its uncanny opening - we’re spoiled with that same bewitching, sacrificial yearning. The object of her affection spells her as she writes odes to her chosen poets, tends to the stove, and he is ‘positively voodoo’ in everything he does. It’s all frisson and ruffles; the lust that sits quietly in the corner of a deep love, not often captured with such affect. All things that are very easy to do when you sound like Lana Del Rey!

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