LUST FOR LIFE
Billboard 200 and Alternative Albums (one week each)
'LOVE'
Rock Digital Song Sales (two weeks),
Alternative Digital Song Sales (one week)
When mysterious, melancholy Lana Del Rey announced her fifth album with a beaming smile and a lead single simply called 'Love,' it seemed change was in the wind. Coming on the heels of 2015's darkly introspective Honeymoon, a Billboard 200 No. 2 album, fans theorized that this would be Del Rey's 'happy album.' Instead, as the 2016 election worked its way into her writing process, Del Rey, 32, metabolized the surrounding chaos into a work both engaged and transportive. "I like the Leonard Cohen quote: 'There's a crack in everything/That's how the light gets in,'" Del Rey says. "I feel like this is the year where we're seeing a lot of cracks -- the cracks that have been there forever. But the blessing in [that] is that we get to shine light on the problems that have been in society for a long time, and hopefully fix them. That makes me feel excited, actually." Along with her longtime collaborator, producer Rick Nowels, Del Rey wove '60s folk with stripped-down hip-hop percussion and, for the first time in her career, welcomed a thoughtfully eclectic guest roster (including Stevie Nicks, The Weeknd and Playboi Carti). For Del Rey, one of few album-oriented pop artists these days, tapping into the mood of the moment paid off: Lead single 'Love' spent two weeks atop the Rock Digital Song Sales chart, and Lust for Life became Del Rey's second Billboard 200 No. 1.