The pop starlet graduates to her first stadium tour with a theatrical set to match, that includes a
Lana Del Rey is surveying her disciples from the entrance porch of a wood-panelled home. Most are clad in white lace attire, purple cowgirl boots, petticoats or heart-shaped sun shades, everybody fizzing with manic ranges of pleasure. The singer floats throughout the stage’s home environs in a white costume and kitten heels, wanting as if she’s been free of a time capsule, dusted off and bid adieu.
Beneath swampy Spanish moss and twinkling stage lights, The Gospel In line with Lana Del Rey remains to be being written, this time on her personal phrases.
Lana has lengthy been aware about outward perceptions, and, like anybody to whom this occurs, she was in a sense sure to what others see in her, say about her, need her to be and never be. The roles assigned to her are assorted, however provide variations on comparable themes. She is the Madonna of the perturbed. She is the picture of the pop music’s American Dream. She is the singer who will not bend to the assumptions of critics, and even followers. She is a lady who offers in subverting expectations and buying and selling on new pathways.
Tonight she is solely herself. On her first-ever stadium tour, the singer stops off in Dublin to ship a splendidly formidable set. Its Southern gothic theatrics and impressed choreography unfold with hanging magnificence.
Lana Del Rey at Aviva Stadium. 30/06/25. Copyright Debbie HickeyOpening with ‘Stars Fell On Alabama’, an unreleased minimize from her nation album which can or might not be on the horizon, the newest period of Lana begins to unravel itself. Some have just lately lamented the singer’s professed transition in direction of nation music, and whereas the new tunes boast the notable motifs — pedal metal wails, strummed acoustics and washboard dribbles — they keep the core of Lana’s classic sonic aesthetic.
However, if we’re calling a spade a spade, Lana Del Rey is a style unto herself. Different new tracks, like ‘Quiet in the South’ and ‘57.5’, whereas nation of their tempo and in a few of their thematic substance, don’t really feel at a take away from what she’s completed since the starting. Lana has lengthy imbued the emotional abandon and cinematic sway of nation in her music, and her Dublin stadium debut makes a level of highlighting this collusion.
She leaves loads of room for her rockier textures, too. A mid-set standout comes with the one-two punch of ‘Ultraviolence’, which offers the Crystals-inspired chorus over a wall of bruised riffage, and ‘Trip’, the string-drenched ballad of self-determination preceded by the epochal monologue manifesto.
Lana Del Rey at Aviva Stadium. 30/06/25. Copyright Debbie HickeyMaybe extra outstanding than the music, nevertheless, is Lana’s bent in direction of poetic lyricism that pinpoints the human situation with painstaking, but bone-simple, totality. Slipping into the title observe of Chemtrails Over the Nation Membership, Del Rey confirms that by means of all of it, she’s nonetheless “unusual and wild”, whereas describing a lifetime of home placidity. It’s apparent her followers see themselves in Lana, and her songs are mirrors that they discover themselves in.
As she shifts into ‘Video Video games’, a garlanded swing descends from the rafters. Swaying earlier than the crowd and kicking her ft in the air, Lana appears proper at residence. About 10 years in the past, I watched her carry out the similar observe to a a lot smaller viewers, albeit nonetheless amphitheatre-sized, with palpable stage-fright and her eyes forged downwards.
Now, Lana is assembly our gaze as everybody joins her in singing about a doomed romance. However relating to the refrain, “It’s you, it’s you. It’s all for you, every part I do”, you’ll be able to assist however really feel it’s a direct deal with to the 50,000 followers, a lot of whom have adopted her since the starting.
Lana Del Rey at Aviva Stadium. 30/06/25. Copyright Debbie HickeyThe second half of her set boasts extra lovely moments. On ‘Do you know that there’s a tunnel beneath Ocean Blvd’, Lana turns the highlight on her background singers, their phenomenal vocals catalysing a collective rolling ecstasy.
‘Younger and Lovely’ is launched with a prelude from Allen Ginsburg’s Howl – which O.G. followers could keep in mind from the singer’s quick movie TROPICO – and sees Lana reappear on stage in an indigo costume with a metres-long prepare that goes all the technique to the again of the stage.
As she croons about ”sizzling summer season nights”, the childlike surprise of romance and the promise of getting older, the large display exhibits throngs of followers in tears at the splendour of all of it. Lana’s breakout classics ‘Born to Die’ and ‘Summertime Disappointment’ take flight on the viewers’s continued feral enthusiasm and, all of a sudden, we’re catapulted again to 2012, a yr solely Lana might make appear romantic.
Nearing the finish of a magical set, Lana cuts wider with the unreleased bluesy observe ‘57.5’, an ode to her hundreds of thousands of Spotify listeners and the ache of loneliness regardless of her on-line fanfare. She then closes out with a mass sing-along to John Denver’s ‘Take Me Residence, Nation Roads’, the viewers spinning in circles and dancing with resplendent exultation.
It’s the remaining minutes in Lana’s world, earlier than the clock strikes half ten and actuality units in. Lana has a actual aptitude for crafting this sort of oasis, a world through which nostalgia reigns supreme, the place the lyrics “Take me residence to the place I belong” linger closely in the sultry mid-summer air and minimize straight to the core.
She savours the previous few moments, making her means by means of the entrance row gathering love notes, embraces, and posing for selfies. The tune fades into a hypnotic outro, and similar to that, it’s 2025 once more.
