As a Lana Del Rey fan, I was looking forward to the release of her latest album Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd for a long time and was excited when it finally released on March 24th, 2023. The album debuted at number three on the US Billboard 200, earning 115,000 units in its opening week. Along with this, the album has received a lot of high praise. A site called metacritic looked at 22 review sites and assigned a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream music critics, and the album received an average score of 81, indicating “universal acclaim”. Are they right to think this? Well, that’s what I’ll try to find out.

My methodology was pretty simple. I listened to the 14 songs on the album 10 times and I gave each song a rating from 1-10. To differentiate the songs, I used quarter decimals. For example, if I gave two songs an 8 but I liked one better, I would give the one I liked better an 8.25, 8.5, or an 8.75 depending on if there was another song with the same grade. If two songs had the exact same number grade, I added 0.05 to the number. It’s very hard for me to give a song a 10, so usually the highest grade I give is a 9.75. After doing this, I ranked the songs from best to worst and got an average score. 

In the 9-10 range or as I like to call it, the elite tier, I graded “Taco Truck x VB” a 9.75, “Let the Light In (feat. Father John Misty)” a 9.55, “Fishtail” a 9.5, “Paris, Texas” a 9.25, and “A&W” a 9. In my opinion, these are the clear top 5 songs. “Taco Truck x VB” is my favorite song on the album because it’s two songs in one with part 1 being a great song called “taco truck” and part 2 being possibly my all time favorite Lana Del Rey song, “Venice B***h”.

In the 7-8.75 range or the good tier, I graded “Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing (feat. Riopy)” an 8.75, “Margaret (feat. Bleachers)” an 8.55, “Peppers (feat. Tommy Genesis)” an 8.5, the title track “Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd” an 8.25, “Fingertips” a 7.75, “The Grants” a 7.55, “Candy Necklace (feat. Jon Batiste)” a 7.5, and “Kintsugi” a 7.25.

In the 5-6.75 range or the decent tier, I only had one graded song, which was “Sweet” with a 6.5. This was the lowest graded song for me.

My overall grade of the album turned out to be an 8.4/10, and I’d say that checks out because I thought this was a great album and some of her best work.