@Anurag Kumar

The moody R&B superstar explores the agony and ecstasy of love.

Her jaded balladry is steeped in glamorous melancholy.

The tracks that defined this most electric of years.

Discover new music from artists we think you'll like. Refreshed every Friday.

Whether it’s Monday morning or Friday night, get going with this personalised mix of upbeat music.

Songs to help you relax and unwind. Updated every Sunday.

When the struggling singer-songwriter once known as Lizzy Grant reinvented herself as Lana Del Rey for her epochal 2011 single “Video Games”, the wistful orchestral ballad introduced an artist who delighted in breaking hearts and the internet alike. It also carved out a space for languid, arty pop in the Top 40, with the swooning “Summertime Sadness” going multiplatinum in multiple countries the following year. The tragic tinges and glossy Hollywood iconography of her songwriting and videos alike made Del Rey a natural fit for soundtracks, from the ghostly “Young and Beautiful” for <i>The Great Gatsby</i> to the lullaby-esque “Watercolor Eyes” for <i>Euphoria</i>. Since then, Lana has kept listeners guessing. Informed equally by classic-rock mythology and modern hip-hop attitude, she proved that she can name-drop Lou Reed in a dream-pop serenade (2014’s “Brooklyn Baby”) as effortlessly as she communes with R&B futurist The Weeknd (2017’s “Lust for Life”). And on her 2019 masterwork <i>Norman F*****g Rockwell!</i>—included on Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums list—she scaled the heights of Elton John’s early-’70s classics (see the casually damning title track) while she still making room for a cover of Sublime’s stoner-funk anthem “Doin’ Time”. In the 2020s, she has remained effortlessly provocative, with the self-referential yearning of 2021’s “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” and the unfiltered intimacy of 2023’s “Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd”. As she continues to build the mythology of Lana Del Rey, she seems to be gradually blurring the line between her art and herself.

Nobody makes feeling bad sound as good as The Weeknd. Even the singer’s sunniest tracks (“Can’t Feel My Face”, “Starboy”) feel anchored by darkness—the sense that pleasure is pain and beauty decays and you can’t have the night without the morning after. The brainchild of Toronto singer Abel Tesfaye, the project took off in 2011 with a string of mixtapes that forged cavernous, falsetto-driven R&B with narratives drenched in drugs, sex and other regrettable decisions—a sound both sensuous and detached, feather-light and dead heavy. His music has become a symbol of hedonism pushed to bleak excess, with songs—“The Hills”, “Often”, “Earned It (Fifty Shades of Grey)”, “After Hours”—whose narrators can’t seem to say no even if they’ll hate themselves for it later. And though the sound has gotten a little brighter over time (“In Your Eyes”, “Take My Breath”), the prevailing mood remains heavy, even unsettling—the ride you want more of even when you’ve had too much.