“We both know it’s not fashionable to love me,” sings Lana Del Rey in the title track and opener of her new album, Honeymoon. It sets the tone for an album which showcases Del Rey at her best: lyrics smoothly mourning a lost love, tinged with a gentle threat. It is a sly reference to her ability to inspire controversy, from the thousands of thinkpieces that followed 2012’s Born to Die which pulled apart her ‘inauthenticity’ (because no musician has ever changed their name before) to her answer to the usual gotcha-feminism questions the press is so fond of springing on her: that she was more interested in “intergalactic possibilities”. Her new album, which includes an interlude featuring Del Rey narrating T.S. Eliot’s Burt Norton, a poem which questions the structure of time itself, as well as detailing her fondness for “soft ice cream”, certainly contains all of Del Rey’s usual idiosyncrasies.

The drum beats from Born to Die are back, having been absent in 2014’s more string-driven Ultraviolence, and they are showcased with effectiveness in ‘High by the Beach’, which has a highly watchable video involving Del Rey dramatically lounging around a beach house before turning to lethal measures to put a stop to the paparazzi’s peering gaze, as well as ‘Freak’, a desperate plea for a boyfriend to “screw your anonymity” and “come to California”. Some reviewers and fans are disappointed that Honeymoon might lack some of the high drama of the set pieces of Born to Die, like ‘National Anthem’ or ‘Off to the Races’. Honeymoon still packs a punch, but the punch is more of a silent knife through the ribs than a bombastic right hook. It is her mediation on failed love that has been dangerously co-dependent – ”You’re my religion” she sings in ‘Religion’ – and loneliness, and how they have intersected. Anyone who thinks this album is boring needs to listen to ‘God Knows I Tried’, which made me enthusiastic for a Lana Del Rey Book of Genesis concept album, or ‘24’, which is almost certainly a better Bond song that whatever Sam Smith comes up with.

Del Rey has proven herself to be capable of melodrama, but also of a more meditative view. ‘Terrence Loves You’, released as an early single, evokes the distance in a failing relationship by referencing Bowie’s Space Oddity – “Trying to transmit, can you hear me? / Ground control to Major Tom / Can you hear me all night long?” – over a delicate piano. ‘Music to Watch Boys To’ has a quiet opening and a capella arrangement which swells into something much grander. Perhaps her most thoughtful moment is the concluding track, a cover of Nina Simone’s ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’. Although it sorely lacks the guitar and clear, genuine emotion which underpins the power of the original, it lays Del Rey at her most bare.

Her central lyrical interests haven’t changed since Born to Die: from the artifice and vapidity of Hollywood – “I've got nothing much to live for / Ever since I found my fame”, she intones in ‘God Knows I Tried’ – a theme continued in her excellent collaboration with The Weeknd in ‘Prisoner’; to the messy lines between love, drugs and sex – ”It never was about the money or the drugs / For you, there's only love”  ‘Religion’ proclaims. But greater focus has elevated these themes – it is clear that she no longer wants to be misunderstood.