Track review: Lana Del Rey’s “First Light”

Best New Track

[Pitchfork circa 2012 voice]

From the dawn of her career, Lana Del Rey’s destiny has always run through video games. The subject launched her to stardom in 2012, as her breakthrough single “Video Games” led to a coveted Saturday Night Live performance while gatekeeping gamers jeered from the sidelines. She could have been swallowed by 2010s meme culture, fated to make an ironic living off of Xbox commercial cameos. Instead, she ignored any mockery and spent the next 15 years shaping herself into pop music’s most unmistakable personality. Video games put her on that path, but all signs along the walk of fame pointed to the silver screen. There was only ever one logical endpoint to her moody crooning, cinematic production, and aching ballads: Lana Del Rey singing a James Bond theme. Even her Bond-like album title, Born to Die, read like a called shot.

Lana has finally reached that mountaintop with her new single “First Light,” but only through a loophole that brings her career full circle. The show-stopping James Bond theme that she’s always been destined to make isn’t for Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming spy thriller; it’s for 007 First Light, a video game that the boyfriend she sang about on her breakthrough single will no doubt play come May 27 if he can sober up long enough to handle a PlayStation controller.

If it’s a cruel twist of fate, Lana once again seems unbothered. She approaches “First Light” with the same magnitude as Adele belting out the anthemic “Skyfall” like her career depended on it. It’s not quite so high stakes for Lana, but perhaps it is for longtime Bond composer David Arnold, who returns to the series with a vengeance after a multi-film absence. His production is grandiose even by 007 standards, with floor-vibrating brass and orchestral stabs that pull Lana’s typically apathetic delivery to the stratosphere. For both artists, it’s the very definition of a statement.

Lana doesn’t compromise her own sound to achieve that statement. If anything, “First Light” doubles as a retrospective of her career to this point. The Western-tinged guitar strokes that unfurl over the slow-simmering verses come just as much from Vic Flick, the guitarist behind Bond’s iconic jangle, as they do from Lana’s own Ultraviolence. “West Coast” and Sheryl Crow’s “Tomorrow Never Dies” are spiritual cousins, after all. The orchestral swells are rife with Bond motifs, but they’re perhaps even more indebted to Honeymoon’s cinematic ode to Italian melodrama. Bond has always been in Lana’s blood, and it doesn’t take reconstructive surgery to let it spill out over a sweeping three-and-a-half minutes of heaven.

But “First Light,” like so many of Lana Del Rey’s longing songs, is not the sound of self-devotion. It is fully committed to the storied legacy of Bond themes, even to a fault. Lana, like so many legends before her, has the unenvious honor of trying to turn the game’s vague title into poetic substance. “Run into the sun like it's the first light of day when you wake,” she croons. “Is it real or is it fake?” It’s a hollow rhyme fit for a Bond theme that needs to function as an overture to 007 First Light’s Bond origin story. The closest Lana comes to going full “Goldfinger” is in a melodically transcendent, but lyrically kitsch chorus that reminds you that this is a song for a video game. “People try and stop you, all the fatеs just watch you, dying just to know whether you'll play your life like a game,” she sings with a wink through the fourth wall. “Will you play?”

A hokey invitation, no doubt, but why not? “This is my idea of fun,” Lana herself once crooned from a darkened SNL soundstage, decked out in her Saturday best. “Playing video games.”

[End of Pitchfork circa 2012 voice]

I blacked out what happened