Honeymoon

Lana Del Rey - Honeymoon
Critic Score
Based on 38 reviews
2015 Ratings: #327 / 1021
Year End Rank: #24
User Score
2015 Rank: #214
Liked by 414 people
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CRITIC REVIEWS

100
Evening Standard

Any lingering doubts that Lana Del Rey is the most captivating popstar on the planet are dispelled within 30 undreamable seconds of Honeymoon.

90
Drowned in Sound

I adore our companionship. I like to take your communiques on long walks, picturing the empty mansion on a hilltop where you wrote this. Your occasional missives to me have been nothing but charming and entrancing.

85
The Line of Best Fit

Honeymoon reaffirms her ability to make important, masterful pop music that doesn’t pay a blind bit of notice to fashion and it's all the better for it.

85
The Young Folks

Honeymoon captures the neon signs of the west, and the desperation of the love that captures the world at large, all wrapped up in a stunning bow that fills us with more angst than joy.

83
Entertainment Weekly

Honeymoon is an album in the classic sense, a set piece that begs for close listening and confounds anyone searching for a collection of hit singles.

80
NME

An intoxicating listen, ‘Honeymoon’ is designed for the red neon glow of a smoky cabaret bar, a Californian answer to the chanson tradition.

80
PopMatters

Producing three major-label albums in four years has developed Lana Del Rey into an artistic innovator who fearlessly draws from style and substance across the past century, whose vision is completely original and not remotely predictable.

80
The Observer

Honeymoon is really one long crystalline glide that lasts for 12 songs, one baffling snippet of a TS Eliot poem and one Nina Simone cover, carried along by music so cinematic and unobtrusive that sometimes it’s barely there.

80
The Telegraph

As an art experience, Honeymoon is gorgeous, and needs to be heard in context with her atmospheric home-made videos. But as pop music, it can fall a bit flat.

80
DIY

This isn’t an album stripped of hooks - far from it - but everything’s approached with a sunken, strung-out quality. It’s Lana’s own style, and in a world where the biggest pop acts construct their own universe, hers could be the most distinct and untouchable.

80
The Independent
Dark side of the American Dream is presented with unflinching skill.
80
The Arts Desk

Honeymoon ... brings a sophisticated world-weariness to the party and may come to be regarded as her signature album in years to come.

80
Uncut
It's her first record that could be a classic rather than just name-checking a bunch of them.
80
Exclaim!

Honeymoon ... is at times brilliant and occasionally boring, a record that moves and morphs, taunts and mystifies.

80
Time Out London

With Del Rey co-producing throughout, ‘Honeymoon’ unfolds languidly over 65 minutes in a familiar swirl of cinematic strings, twangy guitars and exquisitely miserable melodies.

80
Rolling Stone

Whatever her intentions, they've led to her most genuinely thrilling music ever.

80
Mojo

From here, Del Rey will surely be forced to redraw the blueprint, but for now, this is her best yet.

80
The Guardian

With a little chopped-and-screwed modernity, hints of jazz and Morricone-like soundscapes, there’s a timelessness to Honeymoon, and an intrigue that should linger longer than her previous LPs.

75
Pitchfork

Honeymoon just synthesizes ideas she's been vamping on from the beginning into a unified work. She figured where she was going long before she got there; with Honeymoon she has finally arrived.

70
Billboard

Honeymoon erases most of Del Rey’s modern influences ... to better display her sepulchral voice and highly-stylized phrasing, in which the melisma is so arbitrary, it almost seems determined by throws of the I Ching.

70
The Sydney Morning Herald
This is pop music that is enervated and, aside from a pair of obvious bookends, exquisitely isolated.
70
God Is in the TV
The best songs here show Lana has become a great and unique artist, but overall ‘Honeymoon’ is hard work and is too long.
70
Gigwise
With its melancholic, wavering melodies and relentlessly meek lyrics, there is little in Honeymoon to win over sceptics. But, one suspects, that's just as Del Rey intended.
70
American Songwriter

Honeymoon isn’t quite as fine as Ultraviolence, but that’s less an indictment of the new album than high praise of the older one ... In any case, Del Rey’s rollercoaster of a career seems to have steadied on an impressively high level.

70
SPIN

Many of the 14 tracks meander like scenes in a Sophia Coppola film, all variations on depression and scenic pans of sparkling cities and desert expanses.

70
AllMusic

Honeymoon seems comfortingly melancholic and that's the truest sign that it is the fullest execution of Lana Del Rey's grand plan yet.

70
musicOMH

Honeymoon contains all the usual lyrical themes that have dominated her first two records. It is also as broody and cinematic as ever. Yet, why change what has already proved to be a winning formula? What’s more, it may very well be her most fully realised and complete record to date.

70
Tiny Mix Tapes

It was the best of Lana albums, it was the worst of Lana albums. Her voice is immaculate and the music soars.

67
Consequence of Sound

Del Rey is comfortable with the role she’s chosen to represent, no matter how melodramatic or cliched it may come across at this point in her career.

65
Spectrum Culture

This album is not just Born To Die 2–though it is closer to that one than it is to Ultraviolence. It certainly is a step forward, but maybe not a step far enough forward.

60
Slant Magazine

So little of Honeymoon, beyond early highlight and trolling feint of a lead single “High by the Beach,” differentiates itself from a prevailing, uniformly glacial pace.

60
NOW Magazine

Whereas her last album had a gently psychedelic and live-off-the-floor feel, Honeymoon plays it safer with “cinematic” arrangements occasionally pumped up (but not excessively so) with modern drum sounds.

60
Sputnikmusic

Overwrote, overlong, and melodramatic to the nth degree, Honeymoon succeeds because it's what we expected: Lana Del Rey doing Lana Del Rey, complete with the faults and the scars.

60
Under the Radar

There are certain landmarks that characterize a Lana del Rey album: melodrama, nostalgia, and cultural allusions to American myths that are comforting and easily recognizable. Honeymoon has all of that in spades, and Del Rey's dark paradise is becoming more tangible as her career progresses.

60
Q Magazine

At 65-plus minutes' duration, Honeymoon's submarine/somnambulant vibe does rather overstay its welcome.

60
XS Noize

Honeymoon contains all the trademark Lana Del Rey: melodrama, nostalgia and American cultural allusions, the songs’ themes are all steeped with desire, loss and regret. The album showcases Del Ray’s impressive vocal delivery with barely-there instrumentation and is produced well.

58
Pretty Much Amazing

The new record marches, with halting steps, toward suffocating, if lovely, dullness. Lana Del Rey overachieves in this regard. Honeymoon becomes interminable about halfway into its runtime.

50
The Needle Drop
Lana Del Rey's latest project, surprisingly, is an improvement on the singer's previous releases.
melencholysumme
100

i could probably write this review forever, but this album will forever hold a special place in my heart. the lyrics hit so hard to the point where i can’t even listen to it at certain points of my life, which makes it such a good melancholic record for me. the fullness of the production and the emptiness of happiness amount for a atmospheric eerie feeling that i could never describe. songs like the blackest day, encapture this feeling perfectly. imo, this album is so much darker than ... read more

GersonAOTY
86

Honeymoon (9.8/10)
Music To Watch Boys To (9.2/10)
Terrence Loves You (10/10)
God Knows I Tried (9.3/10)
High By the Beach (8.7/10)
Freak (9.3/10)
Art Deco (8.5/10)
Burnt Norton (8.3/10)
Religion (7.8/10)
Salvatore (8.3/10)
The Blackest Day (9.7/10)
24 (8/10)
Swan Song (7.8/10)
Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (7.4/10)

Average Score: 87 💚

choice_kingdom
30

Fuck this shit. There's no content here. None. It's just a collection of multiple variations of the same concept and, let me say, those variations aren't even varied. Lana's potential is ruined. She's better than this.

theshadowlovely
54

Some good tracks but just feels like leftovers from born to die

TIW
71

She devoured with this

VadimBogdanov
80

wow, the vibes!!

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Track List

1Honeymoon
5:50
87
2Music To Watch Boys To
4:50
86
3Terrence Loves You
4:50
88
4God Knows I Tried
4:40
83
5High By the Beach
4:17
85
6Freak
4:55
86
7Art Deco
4:55
87
8Burnt Norton
1:21
77
9Religion
5:23
84
10Salvatore
4:41
88
11The Blackest Day
6:05
90
1224
4:55
83
13Swan Song
5:23
82
14Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood
3:01
76
Total Length: 1 hour, 5 minutes
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Added on: August 14, 2015