Where her elegant wordplay once made her the Patron Saint of Internet Feelings, she now sounds like a millennial troubadour-singing tales of beloved bartenders and broken men, of fast cars and all of the senses, of freedom and transformation and the wreckage of being alive.

“I really do believe that words are one of the last forms of magic,” Lana once said, and she exalts each syllable more than ever here. Trading much of her hardboiled trap-pop and trip-hop malaise for baroque piano ballads and dazzling folk-equal parts Brill Building precision, windswept Laurel Canyon, and 2019 parlances-Lana has begun a dynamic second act in profundity. But on Norman Fucking Rockwell! that ground-swelling complexity coheres to reveal an indisputable fact: She is the next best American songwriter, period. Lana is one of our most complicated stars, a constantly unresolvable puzzle-someone who once called her own work “more of a psychological music endeavor” than pop. Like the Beach Boys, she’s looking for America like Elvis, she’s discomfiting like Dylan, she’s a trickster, and we are all potentially fooled. As Lana revives American myths, with an empty deadpan that would make Lou Reed proud, she also exposes them. Lana neatly cuts through that outmoded fantasy with an emphatic fucking hyphen mark of irreverence, or enthusiasm, or both. His best-known works used a wondrous narrative style to center comfort and simplicity: A pastoral idea, painted and personified, of the American Dream. Norman Rockwell himself illustrated idyllic images of American life and its history, spending 50 years with the Americana propagandists at the weekly Saturday Evening Post. Norman Fucking Rockwell! is Lana at her deepest, and it arrives at a time when the history of America as we know it is being rewritten.

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