Lana Del Rey – “Doin’ Time” (Sublime Cover)

Lana Del Rey – “Doin’ Time” (Sublime Cover)

It appears that collaborating with Jack Antonoff has taken a backseat to channeling the late Bradley Nowell. Instead of sharing news about the highly anticipated Norman Fucking Rockwell, our favorite summer enthusiast Lana Del Rey announced last week that she’d soon be releasing a cover of Sublime’s “Doin Time” in conjunction with a new documentary about the group, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. The announcement came in the form of a cute lip-syncing snippet posted to Instagram along with the documentary’s trailer.

This cover is very, very good. Del Rey’s stacked, reverb-soaked vocals fit this vibe expertly, and some additional percussion adds a gorgeous sweetness. Her ad-libs have a distinctly echoey “Summer Bummer” flavor. The bridge is where Lana really soars, relaxing into syllabic breathy runs and making the otherwise violent lyric “I’d like to hold her head underwater” sound unnervingly sexy.

Norman Fucking Rockwell was initially due in March, which would have kept her on pace for a new album every 18 months since 2014’s Ultraviolence. And although the album has yet to materialize, Lana released incredible singles from the Antonoff sessions throughout the last year. She brought back some of the Born To Die era stylistics on the orchestrally folk-tinged “Mariners Apartment Complex,” and absolutely floored me on the otherworldly 10-minute slow scorcher “Venice Bitch.” In my completely unbiased and professional opinion, she shined the brightest on January’s extravagantly-titled piano ballad, “hope is dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but i have it.”

Not that I’m not already beyond obsessed with these tracks and the new Sublime cover, but I’m getting ever so slightly impatient over here for the new album. (Alexa, play “Venice Bitch.”)

Check out Lana’s “Doin Time” cover below.

We still don’t know when Norman Fucking Rockwell is coming out, hopefully soon. Please.

more from New Music