Lana Del Rey Announces New Album ‘Lasso’
Lana Del Rey is going country. The alternative pop star will take a musical detour on Lasso, a new collection due out in September, Del Rey told the audience at the Billboard and NMPA Songwriter Awards in Los Angeles on Wednesday night (Jan. 31).
While paying tribute from the stage to Jack Antonoff, who’s in the running to become just the second creative to win the producer of the year Grammy for three consecutive years, joining Babyface, Del Rey let guests in her next project.
More from Billboard
”If you can’t already tell by our award winners and our performers, the music business is going country. We’re going country. It’s happening,” she said from the dais. “That’s why Jack has followed me to Muscle Shoals, Nashville, Mississippi, over the last four years.”
The result of that musical journey is a new album slated for release in September, titled Lasso, she explained, her 10th studio LP.
The forthcoming release is the followup to 2023’s Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, which peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 chart.
Antonoff is on a hot streak, with eight Grammys in his trophy cabinet. He has six more chances to add to that collection at the 66th annual Grammys, set for this Sunday, Feb. 4, in L.A., where his work on Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd and Taylor Swift’s Midnights are up for several honors.
To be nominated for producer of the year for five consecutive years, notes Del Rey, is “anything but luck.” Antonoff, she continues, was “born under one of those talent, lucky musical stars,” and as a producer and creative, he can essentially do it all.
Del Rey recounted her first meeting with Antonoff, at one of Clive Davis’ legendary pre-Grammy parties. It was 2018, a particularly “interesting night,” she explains, having broken up with a boyfriend just days before the recording industry’s big night — the second time in her public career. An instant friendship was struck with Jack, who is “friends with everybody.” That friendship shifted to the studio, where five songs were created in a single day. His chord progressions are “timeless, like instantly classic,” she explains. And his “instincts are unique. And apparently award winning.” The music man is a “one in a million.”
Del Rey is on a hot streak of her own, thanks in part to her musical partnership with Antonoff. Lasso will be her fourth album in just three and a half years. Or five since that fortuitous meeting with Antonoff (six including the 2020 audiobook Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass). She has nine top 10 appearances on the Billboard 200 chart, including two No. 1s, with 2014’s Ultraviolence and 2017’s Lust for Life.
Best of Billboard