Songs to download: ‘Terrence Loves You,’ ‘Freak’

Lana’s on her honeymoon and she just wants to get high by the beach. If there’s anything her silky smooth vocals and heartbroken lyrics on her new album, “Honeymoon,” might make you want to do, it’s just that.

The new album is Del Rey’s third on a major label, and it brings the full force return of the femme fatale image with which she dazzled the pop music scene on her debut album, “Born to Die. “ If last year’s “Ultraviolence” was a pop-inspired collection of catchy singles, “Honeymoon” is a far more mellow, melancholic self-portrait, or maybe a snapshot of a current mood—something cynical and self-deprecating. Orchestral sounds and softer piano and guitar-heavy melodies replace last year’s dance beats, with Del Rey’s voice soaring powerfully over it all.

And yet, at times, it gets so angsty as to be borderline self-parody, as on “Terrence Loves You,” when she sings, “But I lost myself when I lost you/But I still got jazz, darling, when I’ve got those blues.” It’s such a classic take on heartbreak that it almost mocks its own desperation. Her dripping honey voice, pouring these lines out over a hypnotic, heavy beat, is something raw and noxious. “Honeymoon” is an album to listen to all the way through, easily shrouding the listener in a seemingly drug-induced haze.

Yet even the heaviness of heartbreak and sin can’t really touch her—she comes off unaffected and unfazed through the whole album, a clear nod to her lack of concern with appealing to a general pop audience. She mocks the fame and fortune of the industry like fans might expect (think “F—ed My Way Up to the Top” from “Ultraviolence”), but it seems as if she needed that full pop exposure in order to eventually revert to this clear definition of herself.

In “Music to Watch Boys To” and “High By the Beach,” Del Rey’s sound is something more similar to what fans might have expected, marked by a vibe-y beat and the sing-along refrains “I like you a lot” and “I just want to get high by the beach.” And, of course, a word on the dark side of millennial relationships: “You can be a bad motherf—er, but that don’t make you a man.”

I admit it’s hard to take her seriously in “Salvatore,” a song where the Italian words “cacciatore” (I’m thinking of the chicken dish, here?) and “ciao amore” make up the primary part of the chorus. She sings, “Now it’s time to eat soft cream,” and I picture her lounging in the summer heat of an Italian piazza sensuously licking melting gelato. Maybe the song is mocking this image of luxury or maybe she simply hopes to travel to Italy one day—I lost her here.

Regardless, as a die-hard Lana fan, I can only praise her choice to refocus her efforts on defining her faux-hipster character. In fact, the last song on the album, a cover of Nina Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” nicely caps off the mood resonating throughout. Take this for what it’s worth, but when it comes down to it, she’s just “a soul whose intentions are good.”