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Lana Del Rey's second studio album arrives like a fever dream wrapped in velvet and barbed wire, a hypnotic descent into the darker corners of American mythology that solidifies her position as pop music's most compelling unreliable narrator. Following the polarizing reception of 2012's "Born to Die" – which saw critics wrestling with whether Elizabeth Grant's carefully constructed persona was authentic artistic expression or calculated pastiche – "Ultraviolence" strips away much of the orchestral bombast in favour of something more intimate and infinitely more unsettling.

The album's gestation was marked by Del Rey's collaboration with Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, a partnership that initially raised eyebrows but proves inspired. Auerbach's garage rock sensibilities provide the perfect foil to Del Rey's cinematic grandeur, grounding her ethereal vocals in dusty, analog warmth. The result feels like discovering a cache of lost recordings from some parallel universe where Dusty Springfield fronted The Velvet Underground while Phil Spector produced their sessions in a desert motel.

Where "Born to Die" occasionally buckled under the weight of its own ambitions, "Ultraviolence" maintains a remarkable consistency of mood and vision. This is Del Rey's most cohesive statement, a 55-minute meditation on love, violence, and the thin line between ecstasy and destruction. The album's title track sets the tone immediately, with Del Rey's voice floating over Auerbach's hypnotic guitar figure like smoke from a cigarette forgotten in an ashtray. "He hit me and it felt like a kiss," she purrs, transforming The Crystals' controversial 1962 single into something even more provocative and psychologically complex.

The album's masterstroke is "West Coast," a shape-shifting epic that begins as a languid ballad before morphing into a hip-hop influenced groove that shouldn't work but absolutely does. It's Del Rey at her most experimental, proving that beneath the carefully cultivated retro aesthetic lies a genuinely innovative artist willing to push boundaries. The track's success lies in its refusal to choose between past and present, instead existing in some timeless space where genres collapse into pure emotion.

"Shades of Cool" emerges as perhaps the album's most devastating moment, a slow-burning character study that finds Del Rey observing a lover's descent into addiction with the detached fascination of a documentary filmmaker. Her vocals here are particularly striking, multi-tracked into ghostly harmonies that suggest both angels and sirens. The song's seven-minute runtime allows space for genuine emotional development, something often absent from contemporary pop.

The album's quieter moments prove equally compelling. "Pretty When You Cry" strips the arrangements down to their essence, allowing Del Rey's voice to carry the full weight of the song's melancholy. Meanwhile, "Brooklyn Baby" offers a rare moment of levity, gently satirising hipster culture while somehow managing to celebrate it simultaneously – a trick only Del Rey could pull off convincingly.

Auerbach's production throughout is exemplary, favouring analogue warmth over digital precision. The drums hit with satisfying thud, the guitars ring with vintage authenticity, and Del Rey's vocals sit perfectly in the mix, close enough to feel intimate but distant enough to maintain their mystique. This is music that demands to be played on vinyl, crackling through vintage speakers in dimly lit rooms.

Ten years on, "Ultraviolence" stands as Del Rey's creative peak, the album where her various influences and obsessions coalesced into something genuinely singular. While subsequent releases have explored different territories – some successfully, others less so – none have matched this album's sustained intensity and vision. It's a record that revealed Del Rey as more than just a purveyor of nostalgic pastiche, establishing her as a genuine auteur capable of transforming familiar elements into something entirely her own.

The album's influence on contemporary pop cannot be overstated. Its blend of vintage aesthetics and modern production techniques has become the template for countless artists, while Del Rey's unflinching exploration of toxic relationships and American decay feels more relevant than ever. "Ultraviolence" didn't just establish Lana Del Rey as a major artist – it created an entirely new template for what pop music could be in the 21st century.