The interlude also marks the album’s synthesis of Del Rey’s earlier, beat-heavy, hip-hop-adjacent “Born to Die” and “Ultraviolence” eras with the slow balladry of her recent works.

The cinematic violins and rolling brass in the background of “Arcadia” swell in the next track, “Interlude - The Trio,” which overlays heavy trap beats over a Western-inspired brass theme written by Italian composer Ennio Morricone for the movie “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” The interpolation of the hip-hop beats with classic strings and soaring trumpets signals a cultural reckoning that underlies several of Del Rey’s songs - “Text Book” has her “screamin’ ‘Black Lives Matter’” - and is especially significant following the final lyrics of “Arcadia”: “You’ll need a miracle/America.” “Arcadia” is at once a love song in which the singer encourages her lover to “run your hands over me like a Land Rover” and a mournful elegy of a self-proclaimed “lost little girl.” Del Rey longs for a place of belonging, a place which the dolefully crooned “America” no longer is. What follows in the track “Arcadia” is one of Del Rey’s sweetest, purest vocal performances in her career and is nothing short of a melancholic triumph. It’s almost as if Del Rey were sitting in a porch rocking chair with a beer in her hand, telling you matter-of-factly about the man who promised to “fix her weathervane give children.” “Blue Banisters,” like many of the songs that follow in the album, rejoices in domesticity and simplicity, in healing and sisterhood - a focus that beautifully complements Del Rey’s complex emotional emptiness after her lover fails to keep his promises and abandons her: “There’s a hole that’s in my heart all my women try and heal.” Sparse, simple piano chords let Del Rey’s dreamy and pensive voice shine, while casually intimate details and dialogue such as “Jenny handed me a beer, said, ‘How the hell did you get there?’” enhance the song’s storytelling power. The titular track “Blue Banisters” revels in the quotidian. At once timeless and timely, traditional and experimental, “Blue Banisters” is Del Rey’s reckoning of her troubled past with her present surroundings (both physical and cultural) as she revisits her earlier style while presenting her most polished voice yet. This time, however, Del Rey also focuses on family and friendship and healing, which become just as important as her relationship with her lover.

The album continues the singer’s tradition of sad, witchy balladry and explores her archetypal themes of tumultuous love and feelings of disquietude.

So asks Lana Del Rey, dubbed Patron Saint of Internet Feelings, in her latest album “Blue Banisters,” released Oct. “What if someone had asked Picasso not to be sad?”

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