Live Report: Lana Del Rey turns the Aviva Stadium into a Southern gothic fantasia

Lana Del Rey is surveying her disciples from the front porch of a wood-panelled house. Most are clad in white lace dresses, red cowgirl boots, petticoats or heart-shaped sunglasses, everyone fizzing with manic levels of excitement. The singer floats across the stage's domestic environs in a white dress and kitten heels, looking as though she's been freed from a time capsule, dusted off and bid adieu.

Beneath swampy Spanish moss and twinkling stage lights, The Gospel According to Lana Del Rey is still being written, this time on her own terms.

Lana has long been privy to outward perceptions, and, like anyone to whom this happens, she was in a sense bound to what others see in her, say about her, want her to be and not be. The roles assigned to her are varied, but offer variations on similar themes. She is the Madonna of the perturbed. She is the image of the pop music’s American Dream. She is the singer who won't bend to the assumptions of critics, or even fans. She is a woman who deals in subverting expectations and trading on new pathways.

Tonight she is entirely herself. On her first-ever stadium tour, the singer stops off in Dublin to deliver a wonderfully ambitious set. Its Southern gothic theatrics and inspired choreography unfold with striking elegance.

Lana Del Rey at Aviva Stadium. 30/06/25. Copyright Debbie Hickey

Opening with ‘Stars Fell On Alabama’, an unreleased cut from her country album which may or may not be on the horizon, the latest era of Lana begins to unravel itself. Some have recently lamented the singer’s professed transition towards country music, and while the new tunes boast the notable motifs — pedal steel wails, strummed acoustics and washboard dribbles — they maintain the core of Lana’s vintage sonic aesthetic.

But, if we’re calling a spade a spade, Lana Del Rey is a genre unto herself. Other new tracks, like ‘Quiet in the South’ and ‘57.5’, while country in their tempo and in some of their thematic substance, don’t feel at a remove from what she’s done since the beginning. Lana has long imbued the emotional abandon and cinematic sway of country in her music, and her Dublin stadium debut makes a point of highlighting this collusion.

She leaves plenty of room for her rockier textures, too. A mid-set standout comes with the one-two punch of ‘Ultraviolence’, which provides the Crystals-inspired refrain over a wall of bruised riffage, and ‘Ride’, the string-drenched ballad of self-determination preceded by the epochal monologue manifesto.

Lana Del Rey at Aviva Stadium. 30/06/25. Copyright Debbie Hickey

Perhaps more prominent than the music, however, is Lana’s bent towards poetic lyricism that pinpoints the human condition with painstaking, yet bone-simple, totality. Slipping into the title track of Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Del Rey confirms that through it all, she’s still “strange and wild”, while describing a life of domestic placidity. It’s obvious her fans see themselves in Lana, and her songs are mirrors that they find themselves in.

As she shifts into ‘Video Games’, a garlanded swing descends from the rafters. Swaying before the crowd and kicking her feet in the air, Lana seems right at home. About 10 years ago, I watched her perform the same track to a much smaller audience, albeit still amphitheatre-sized, with palpable stage-fright and her eyes cast downwards.

Now, Lana is meeting our gaze as everyone joins her in singing about a doomed romance. But when it comes to the chorus, “It’s you, it’s you. It’s all for you, everything I do”, you can help but feel it’s a direct address to the 50,000 fans, many of whom have followed her since the beginning.

Lana Del Rey at Aviva Stadium. 30/06/25. Copyright Debbie Hickey

The second half of her set boasts more beautiful moments. On ‘Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd’, Lana turns the spotlight on her background singers, their phenomenal vocals catalysing a collective rolling ecstasy.

‘Young and Beautiful’ is introduced with a prelude from Allen Ginsburg’s Howl – which O.G. fans may remember from the singer’s short film TROPICO – and sees Lana reappear on stage in an indigo dress with a metres-long train that goes all the way to the back of the stage.

As she croons about ”hot summer nights”, the childlike wonder of romance and the promise of getting older, the big screen shows throngs of fans in tears at the splendour of it all. Lana's breakout classics ‘Born to Die’ and ‘Summertime Sadness’ take flight on the audience’s continued feral enthusiasm and, all of a sudden, we're catapulted back to 2012, a year only Lana could make seem romantic.

Nearing the end of a magical set, Lana cuts wider with the unreleased bluesy track ‘57.5’, an ode to her millions of Spotify listeners and the ache of loneliness despite her online fanfare. She then closes out with a mass sing-along to John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’, the audience spinning in circles and dancing with resplendent exultation.

It is the final minutes in Lana’s world, before the clock strikes half ten and reality sets in. Lana has a real flair for crafting this kind of oasis, a world in which nostalgia reigns supreme, where the lyrics “Take me home to the place I belong” linger heavily in the sultry mid-summer air and cut straight to the core.

She savours the last few moments, making her way through the front row collecting love notes, embraces, and posing for selfies. The song fades into a hypnotic outro, and just like that, it’s 2025 again.