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Lana Del Rey is renowned internationally not just for her critically-acclaimed discography, but also for her distinctive visuals and aesthetic sheen. This is most apparent in her ever-growing collection of music videos, which usually invoke her nostalgia for old Hollywood and musical icons of the past.

 

Her most popular music videos include ‘Born To Die’, ‘Young and Beautiful’ and ‘Blue Jeans’, with hundreds of millions of views online. Her newest music video is for ‘White Mustang’, a track from her latest album Lust For Life. The video has been teased for weeks, and was finally dropped on her YouTube and Vevo channels on Wednesday. Unfortunately, it doesn’t live up to the expectations set by her filmography to date.

 

Lana Del Rey stands over her lover, clearly in control of the relationship.

The video opens with a shot of a futuristic apartment complex, zooming in on Del Rey, similar to the opening of ‘High By The Beach’. She’s standing over a long-haired man, Icelandic actor/musician Eðvarð Egilsson. Close-up shots of her hands touching this mysterious lover throughout the video imply that their relationship is mainly physical.

The city around her is littered with massive skyscrapers. This lends a sci-fi feel to the video, which fits in with the space-age aesthetic of Lust For Life. However that said, it feels forced this time, and doesn’t hold up when compared to the stunning galactic visuals from the ‘Love’ music video. The video closes as Lana and her lover dance outside together. As the music fades, the video continues for another couple of minutes with a Spanish instrumental. As a rocket is seen launching in the background, there is also a brief clip of ‘Get Free’, the closing track from Lust For Life.

There’s no chemistry at all between these two, resulting in a lacklustre music video.

In all honesty, this is my least favourite music video from Del Rey across her entire career. As a super-fan of her music, I love almost everything she produces, but this video just doesn’t resonate. Despite the polished cinematography, there’s no on-screen connection between Del Rey and Egilsson. There was an intense attraction between Del Rey and Bradley Soileau in the videos for ‘Born To Die’, ‘Blue Jeans’ and ‘West Coast’, but that uninhibited lust is missing from ‘White Mustang’. Nothing of note happens in the video either, which I find especially frustrating given that she clearly had a reasonable budget. It was nice to see a departure from the heavy-handed vintage filters that plague so many of her productions, but this video doesn’t do justice to the album. I’m going to hope that ‘White Mustang’ is nothing more than a blip on an otherwise outstanding filmography, and that this is a blunder Lana Del Rey won’t be repeating.