Blue Banisters is Lana Del Rey's eighth studio album which dropped on October 22nd, 2021. While it's an amazing album overall I want to talk about two specific songs from the album and how they came to life. The songs I’m talking about are Dealer and Thunder. What they have in common is that they were originally recorded and made in a collaboration Lana did with The Last Shadow Puppets. Wich is a band consisting of Alex Turner, lead singer and guitarist of the Arctic Monkeys, Miles Kane, solo artist, Zach Dawes, accomplished bassist, and James Ford, drummer and producer for The Last Shadow Puppets, Arctic Monkeys, Florence and the Machine, Gorillaz and more. In 2017 they got together and recorded an entire album.
This was confirmed by Lana Del Rey in a 2019 interview she did with NME magazine, there it says; "We had a little rock band on the side,” she explains. “It kind of didn’t go anywhere but we had a good time." Then she casually slips into conversation that the group, which also included Kane, made a whole album together. “It’s never…” she begins when asked when we can hear it. “We were very messy! But it’s cool ‘California’ made it on there – I feel like it’s a little piece of our friendship band."
California is a song on her 6th official studio album Norman Fucking Rockwell and the first confirmed released song from that collab. In his 2018 album Coup the Grace Miles Kane has a song called loaded in which you can hear Lana’s vocals in the background. Though it was never confirmed if that was also a result of that same unreleased album.
Many people online were drawn to Dealer. The intensity and aesthetic of the song brought us back to the Ultraviolence era and Lana’s intense vocals were something we've only mainly heard from her on her darker unreleased leaked songs. But personally, Thunder is my favorite. I've been listening to this song ever since it first leaked. The unreleased version which got constantly deleted and re-uploaded on Youtube was slightly different than the studio version. Though I personally prefer the first version. I love how you can now clearly hear The Last Shadow Puppet's influence on Lana's album. The violins in the song are something that is so typically The Last Shadow Puppets. Their string section is something they are known for and is very present on both their albums.
For me personally, it's quite tragic that the album was never released because I love all the artists involved. Many people felt this way since the Lana Del Rey and the Arctic Monkeys fandoms overlap often online. I do love the idea of artists coming together though, and just messing around, having fun and just creating their art. All of them putting in little pieces of themselves which you can very clearly hear in this collab. We should be happy with the things the artists themselves have put out, the songs they liked the best and felt are representative of the artist they want to be, I'm secretly hoping lana’s laptop gets stolen again so that we can enjoy more of this collab.