Like everybody else, Lana Del Rey is playing hide-and-seek with quarantine. For her seventh album, the New Yorker based in Los Angeles has opted for hushed intimacy, bedroom melodies and confessional arrangements. With Chemtrails Over the Country Club, her pop is folkier than ever, although the echo and reverb in which her exquisite, sensual and hypnotic voice basks set her high above the clouds. This folk idiom fascinates her to the point that she closes out this record (with some help from Natalie Mering aka Weyes Blood and Zella Day) with a magnificent cover of Joni Mitchell's For Free, taken from her album Ladies of the Canyon (1970). There are also those guitars with an air of the Laurel Canyon 70's scene about them on Not All Who Wander Are Lost, and the equally pure guitar sounds that open Yosemite. As usual, Lana Del Rey takes out her pen to decry the torments of celebrity and the star system, starting with White Dress which opens the album, regretting the good old days when she was a barmaid, unknown and listening to Sun Ra, Kings Of Leon and the White Stripes "when they were white hot". Further on, she offers up more references to the music history as on Breaking Up Slowly (a duet with Nikki Lane) where she addresses the marital storms between those two legends of country music, Tammy Wynette and George Jones. On song after song, this solitary amazon soldiers on, not battling for any particular cause, just doing what is right by her own lights ("Well, I don't care what they think. Drag racing my little red sports car. I'm not unhinged or unhappy, I'm just wild"). Chemtrails Over the Country Club shows above all that she excels in the art of storytelling, wielding her tweezers to fine-tune every detail of her lyrics. At 35, Lana Del Rey has arguably released her freest and most accomplished album.