Lana Del Rey dresses up harsh truths in the gauzy balm of seductive pop

Lana Del Rey is one of the pop stars of our age, a self-styled, self-obsessed icon for the selfie generation.

Her entire oeuvre has effectively been a microscopic examination of her own neuroses, presented as a filtered fantasy of Instagram glamour, where the soft focus somehow only serves to emphasise jagged edges lurking beneath the surface.

Her lush, bittersweet songs (and videos and fashion photos) exist on a knife edge between Hollywood dreams and harsh reality, essaying a seductive melancholy fuelled by depression, self-hatred, abusive relationships and narcotic dependency.

"Beautiful problems, God knows we've got them," she sighs with forlorn emphasis on Beautiful People Beautiful Problems, a track on her new album Lust for Life.

The song title is typical Del Rey, both mordantly funny yet genuinely sad.

WATCH the music video for Love, a track from Lana Del Rey's album Lust for Life

She's been ludicrously attacked for being unauthentic in the past.

When the unknown singer-songwriter released a compelling lo-fi home-made video clip in 2011, the world almost instantly fell in love with her 21st-century take on the femme fatale.

But it wasn't long before trolls rounded on her, misogynistically speculating about whether her beauty had been surgically enhanced and denouncing her particular brand of artifice as hypocritical, as if modern pop was some kind of bastion of gritty authenticity.

Yet each new release confirms her status as a genuinely original performance pop artist who treats her career as a kind of living art installation.

Del Rey's perfect artifice has been to dress up harsh truth in the gauzy balm of seductive pop.

Del Rey's big hair and fake lashes should not distract from the fact that as an original, distinctive, modern pop artist, she is about as real as it comes. - The Daily Telegraph

• This article was originally published in The Times.