Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.

Line by line, her lyrics deliver a staggering blend of the profound and the vernacular. ... At 77 minutes in length, “Ocean Blvd” risks tiring the listener’s ear, which is why Del Rey and her co-producers — Antonoff along with Drew Erickson, Zach Dawes and Mike Hermosa — keep folding unexpected sounds and textures into the album’s largely piano-based arrangements.

It's a lurid, scuzzy, electrifying return to form.

So while Del Rey is still the same sepia-tinted, sun-soaked American aesthete that she once was, there are real lifetime stamps all over Did you know that conjure a biographical sincerity, instigating a personal closeness.

Del Rey’s longest album to date by some distance – and not without the occasionally questionable choice. But the best moments, which abound, solidify Del Rey as one of the all-time greats.

Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd arrives as a sweeping, confounding work-in-process. It’s full of quiet ruminations and loud interruptions; of visible seams and unhemmed edges.

Del Rey, at her best, has a finger not just on the pulse, but somewhere beneath the flesh. And she is occasionally at her best here. “Ocean Blvd” is Del Rey’s strongest and most daring album since “Rockwell,” though it’s also marked by uneven pacing and occasional overindulgence.

Sprawling. ... Engrossing, audacious record.

Lana Del Rey has honed a style so unique she’s almost a genre unto herself. Full of brilliant strides forward, Ocean Blvd. is a crucial chapter in Del Rey’s ongoing saga of heartbreak and enchantment.

Sonically, Ocean Blvd plays out like an elevated take on what she accomplished on Born to Die: the type of anachronistic fusion of Sixties beat poetry, Seventies FM piano pop and more current rap and dance music production that only Del Rey can pull off.

If it wasn’t for a couple of unfortunate lulls and longueurs, the odd dubious creative choice, it could easily look Norman Fucking Rockwell in the eye. [May 2023, p.85}

‘…Ocean Blvd’ might deal with some major existential questions, but there’s still plenty of fun to be had and cements Del Rey’s status as one of modern music’s most intriguing songwriters.

It is her quietest, most wilfully inscrutable record in a long time, perhaps since 2015’s glacially paced, rebelliously quiet Honeymoon. ... Instead, many songs here are subtle, vaporous, but potent all the same.

Her sweeping, layered ninth album is more ruminative than reactive: questions of family and legacy, memory and death swirl around one another until they’re one in the same.

Ultimately, for another sonically cohesive record, the thread that ties this package together is the exploration of American melancholia. ... This is where she thrives. And, thankfully, this is where Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd spends most of its time.

Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd is a 16-track, 78-minute album, and some of it will lose even her most ardent fans. Track eight is where it regains itself through the extended metaphor of “Kintsugi”: a Japanese term for a pottery repair technique that calls attention to the crack rather than hides it. .... [After “Margaret”] There are three more tracks, though.

If you've not already bought into the LDR mythos, it's like joining a long-form TV show midway through its difficult fourth season. [Jun 2023, p.26]

A leisurely 77 minutes of beautifully orchestrated ballads, electronic experimentation, spoken word interludes and callbacks to previous Del Rey songs. Like the vast majority of her previous albums, there’s almost too much to take in, but you have to admire the sheer bloody-mindedness to do things her own way.

Framed by twin poles of classicism and experimentation, ‘Did you know…’ never truly succumbs to either. An often-unsettling river of song, it finds Lana Del Rey discussing uncomfortable truths, while denying the use of easy answers. What she chooses to reveal is profound, occasionally disquieting, and never dull.

he record staggers on into “Fishtail,” a dull trap ballad, and hits a dead-end with “Peppers,” an excursion into rap which is an absolute mess; so incoherent that it's excruciating. Moments like these are baffling because, without them, Did You Know… would compete among Lana’s very best. In fact, in certain gorgeous moments – like during the strange haziness of “Fingertips” or the ecstatic climax of “The Grants” – this is a beautiful album.

As a listen, it doesn’t always completely land, but when it does it’s truly exciting. As an artist, ‘Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd’ shows Lana Del Rey pushing herself perhaps more than ever.

It is either the sound of someone who has begun to believe her own publicity, or who has stopped caring what anyone else thinks and is determined to follow her muse wherever it wanders. There’s a fine album lurking amidst the indulgence but listeners have their work cut out trying to locate it.

Ocean Blvd traffics in some nimble, effervescent melodies, a few memorable vocal passages, and the occasional tuneful duet (Father John Misty proves to be an exceptional bedfellow on “Let the Light In”). But the album feels more like a placeholder in Del Rey’s discography than a truly audacious chapter in the singer’s blossoming late-period reawakening.

Though a handful of tracks sparkle, Under Ocean Blvd is a chore to ingest across its regularly lulling 77 minutes. ... Yes, Del Rey sings beautifully and will rightfully be recognized as a veritable voice of her generation — both in technique and disillusion — but here the cool distance she’s maintained between herself and listeners feels more expansive than ever.