Lana Del Rey Performs Hit-Filled Reading Festival Set as It Looks Increasingly Unlikely ‘Lasso’ Will Be Released in 2024

Paul Cauthen and Mason Ramsey have brought her out on stage; she’s friends with Lainey Wilson, Meg McRee and Nikki Lane; she’s even sung ‘Tennessee Orange’ with Megan Moroney. How much longer will Lana Del Rey go on teasing us until she puts out her country album?

If this weekend’s back-to-back Reading and Leeds Festival appearances are anything to go by, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that we’ll be hearing Lana Del Rey’s Lasso before the end of 2024.

The performances, which – along with her set as the opening-night headline act at the Rock en Seine music festival in Paris – had been highly anticipated as potentially being the first time the singer would share music from her forthcoming album, Lasso. According to her own announcement during a Billboard pre-Grammys event earlier this year, her next Jack Antonoff-produced project was due to be released in September 2024 and would reportedly feature a country sound.

She also previously shared a snippet of an unreleased country-leaning song, ‘Henry, Come On’, via Instagram in mid-January. The sparse acoustic clip featured Lana losing her patience with a partner, as she sings, “Do you think I’d really choose it? All of this off and on? Henry, come on”.

During her speech in honour of her frequent collaborator, Jack Antonoff, who was being given the Producer of the Year award for the third consecutive year at the Billboard pre-Grammys event, Lana shared how the genre has been taking over the industry, “If you can’t already tell by our award winners and our performers, the music business is going country”.

She went on to tease her new project, “We’re going country. It’s happening. That’s why Jack has followed me to Muscle Shoals, Nashville, Mississippi over the last four years”.

But with no sign of the album on Universal Music’s Autumn schedules and no songs from it on her setlist at Reading Festival on Saturday night, it seems Lasso might not be happening as soon as we'd hoped - and it might not be as “country” as she’d first promised, either.

“All my albums are somewhat rooted in Americana, unless it’s an album like Honeymoon which has a jazz flair, so I don’t think it will be a heavy departure”, Lana Del Rey told Vogue ahead of her shows in Paris last week. “If anything, it will just be a little lighter lyrically, and more pointed in a classic country, American, or Southern Gothic production - which again, so many of my songs already are.”

You can expect a follow-up to her latest single, ‘Tough’ with Quavo, very soon though. In Del Rey’s own words, she told Vogue: “We have two more coming out by the end of the year!”

After Dasha had opened the main stage on Friday afternoon and Jessie Murph had put in an electrifying performance on the BBC Radio 1 Stage shortly before Lana Del Rey’s set on Saturday evening, it was looking like Reading Festival might be in for a full-on country take over.

Sadly, for the country music lovers in the audience at Reading Festival, we weren’t treated to ‘Tough’ or any of those yet-to-be-released songs from Lasso. Nonetheless, the Saturday night crowd - which felt refreshingly multi-generational - were still treated to a masterclass in modern folk-pop storytelling from one of America’s greatest living songwriters, albeit a slightly truncated one after she came on late and had her microphone turned off during the first verse of her encore, ‘Hope Is A Dangerous Thing For A Woman Like Me To Have – But I Have It.’

Before that though - despite battling with the overspill from Sonny Fodera’s DJ set on the stage directly opposite – Lana Del Rey had persevered with a delicately paced set that included hits such as ‘Ride,’ ‘Video Games,’ ‘Summertime Sadness’ and a reimagining of ‘Chemtrails Over the Country Club’ as a rousing gospel spiritual.

“Can you hear me through the techno?” she asked the crowd at one point, but sadly it was a battle she only sometimes won.

Words by Sonny Owen

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