Lana Del Rey Returns with the Confounding “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter”

Design by Bennett Himmel

By Bennett Himmel

For the last decade and a half, Lana Del Rey has skillfully created her own myth, flitting about from the shiny hip-hop and jazz inflected pop of the now legendary Born To Die to the brilliant, sun-kissed adult contemporary of 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! Since 2012, Lana has perfectly represented where the culture is headed in America, which is why it makes complete sense that she went from a witch who hexed Trump to an Alabama alligator trad-wife in just under a decade. Lana’s faced near unending controversy since her well-intentioned but poorly-worded “Question For The Culture” in 2020. Luckily, the strength of her songwriting kept her afloat. 2021’s Chemtrails Over The Country Club and Blue Banisters were impeccably written, if at turns dull. In 2023, the glistening, smoky, impeccable folk album Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd brought her back to the pantheon of greatness with revelations on family, God, and mortality.

Then came her singles from last year. “Henry, Come On”and “Bluebird” were poised to be the lead singles from a purported country album first titled Lasso and later The Right Person Will Stay, rumored to be inspired by her recent marriage to the politically blurry alligator tour guide Jeremy Dufrene. The songs were interminably dull, completely drained of Lana’s trademark wit and self-awareness. They were bland, devoid of any real direction. Lana over country guitar and Disney strings should be groundbreaking! Instead, they felt phoned-in and shallow. Luckily, her newest single off of the now-retitled Stove, “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter,” co-written by Dufrene, is anything but.

Over a sample of Ella Fitzgerald’s “Laura,” we hear Lana doing a trademark “A&W” and “National Anthem” inspired bratty talk-rap. “When I met him, like an arrow / Like a bird in the heart, like a sparrow / In the dark, snap crackle pop / Fsss CHHHH / We’re a match, he’s just in my bone marrow.” Like all the best Lana songs, it strikes a perfect balance between unserious and addictive. But on the verses of this track, Lana gives a vocal performance unlike anything we’ve heard from her before. Over Fantasia-esque strings, Lana takes on the vocal tone of Snow White singing to her birds, wandering around the kitchen in a deranged stupor. “Whoopsy daisy! YOOHOO yelling I love YOUHOO out tomywhitefeatherhawktaildeerhuntererr…” she squeals, and it immediately feels like the most provocative thing Lana’s done in ages. Whether it totally pays off is yet to be seen. Her voice sounds curiously shrill, and while “A&W” was equally bizarre, that song was an inquiry into what it’s like to be a woman in a world that has been built against you, and what it’s like to have come out the other side of being the most-hated woman in showbiz. “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter,” however, is about how amazing it is to be Lana Del Rey cooking dinner for her husband on the bayou. The whole trad-wife thing, as tongue-in-cheek as it may be, feels too on-the-nose for Lana, who has in the past expertly examined what it means to be submissive while still in power.

Then there’s the matter of the music video. It may be hard to believe, but early on, Lana had one of the best pop girl videographies out. Think about it: “Video Games?” “National Anthem?” “RIDE???” Unfortunately, in recent years, Lana videos have mostly been filmed on iPhones, simply compilations of Lana walking around and pouting. The video for “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” is more of the same at first glance, though there’s definitely a darker undercurrent in this one. In the “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” video, we start with a sepia-filtered Lana dancing and eating Kraft mac and cheese, and end with her head in the oven. Lana has always been fascinated by Sylvia Plath, but this is maybe the most on-the-nose tribute yet. The video is fun if unessential, but “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter” remains the most compelling package Lana has presented to us in a long time, and I can confidently say that Stove will be more than just a country album.