Track review: Lana Del Rey’s “First Light”

From the dawn of her career, Lana Del Rey’s destiny has always run through video games. The subject launched her to stardom in 2012, as her breakthrough single “Video Games” led to a coveted Saturday Night Live performance while gatekeeping gamers jeered from the sidelines. She could have been swallowed by 2010s meme culture, fated to make an ironic living off of Xbox commercial cameos. Instead, she ignored any mockery and spent the next 15 years shaping herself into pop music’s most unmistakable personality. Video games put her on that path, but all signs along the walk of fame pointed to the silver screen. There was only ever one logical endpoint to her moody crooning, cinematic production, and aching ballads: Lana Del Rey singing a James Bond theme. Even her Bond-like album title, Born to Die, read like a called shot. Lana has finally reached that mountaintop with her new single “First Light,” but only through a loophole that brings her career full circle. The show-stopping James Bond theme that she’s always been destined to make isn’t for Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming spy thriller; it’s for 007 First Light, a video game that the boyfriend she sang about on her breakthrough single

Apr 16, 2026 → Apr 16, 2026