“High By The Beach” Puts A Bittersweet Cap on the Summer

If there’s one thing Lana Del Rey has always been good for, it’s providing a song to go on your summer soundtrack. Earlier this summer, it was a remix of “Florida Kilos,” and then, of course, there was her ultimate pièce de résistance back in 2012, “Summertime Sadness.”

The second single, “High By The Beach,” from her forthcoming album, Honeymoon, is no exception to Lana’s rule. Fraught with a simultaneous carefreeness and a vindictive sort of melancholy, LDR persists on her path to singular perfection. Crooning, “All I wanna do is get high by the beach, get high by the beach, get high/All I wanna do is get by by the beach/Get by/Baby baby, bye bye,” Del Rey establishes an anthem of languor.

But it isn’t just about Del Rey lulling her adoring masses into relaxation, it’s about her anger at a former lover (as it usually is), as she seethes, “The truth is I never bought into your bull shit when you would pay tribute to me.” She intertwines her signature chill California vibes with the New York scorpion (a water-loving creature, mind you) inside her by concluding, “Everyone can start again/Not through love but through revenge/Through the fire, we’re born again/Peace by vengeance brings the end.” And so, too, does this ambient track bring the summer of 2015 to its own slow burn of an ending.