

The day following the release of Chemtrails, Del Rey announced the project under the title Rock Candy Sweet, alongside a release date of June 1, 2021. I also have a secondary title I like that summed up 18 months of my life.” “Spending so much time in a close circle of country music friends, I could see one option for a title coming from that.

When asked about any potential titles she had in mind for the upcoming albums, she replied: On March 15, 2021, four days before the release of her sixth major-label studio album Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Del Rey announced she was working on two future music projects in an interview with MusicWeek. The first indication of Del Rey's seventh major-label studio album came via a tweet posted on November 17, 2020, wherein she remarked that she was working on two albums.

Not only did the song prove it was possible to cultivate genuine mystique in the age of oversharing, but it also carved out a space for languid, Twin Peaks-worthy art-pop amid a Top 40 normally reserved for jacked-up pop anthems. At a time when social media was giving people the power to curate their identities and present idealized versions of themselves online, the struggling singer-songwriter once known as Lizzy Grant (born in New York in 1985) reinvented herself as Lana Del Rey for her epochal 2011 single “Video Games.” The wistful orchestral ballad (and an accompanying Super 8-style video that heralded the ubiquity of soft-focus Instagram filters) introduced a femme fatale who delighted in breaking hearts and the internet alike, knowingly using coquettish sex-kitten cliches as a means to probe male behavior and, by extension, the American id itself. Though she’s got the name and look of a ’60s-era Hollywood star, Lana Del Rey could only have emerged in the internet era.
