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[Pitchfork circa 2012 voice]<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n From the dawn of her career, Lana Del Rey\u2019s destiny has always run through video games. The subject launched her to stardom in 2012, as her breakthrough single \u201cVideo Games\u201d 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\u2019s 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<\/em>, read like a called shot.<\/p>\n Lana has finally reached that mountaintop with her new single \u201cFirst Light,\u201d but only through a loophole that brings her career full circle. The show-stopping James Bond theme that she\u2019s always been destined to make isn\u2019t for Denis Villeneuve\u2019s upcoming spy thriller; it\u2019s for 007 First Light<\/em>, a video game that the boyfriend she sang about on her breakthrough single will no doubt play come May 27 if he can sober up long enough to handle a PlayStation controller.<\/p>\n If it\u2019s a cruel twist of fate, Lana once again seems unbothered. She approaches \u201cFirst Light\u201d with the same magnitude as Adele belting out the anthemic \u201cSkyfall\u201d like her career depended on it. It\u2019s not quite so high stakes for Lana, but perhaps it is for longtime Bond composer David Arnold, who returns to the series with a vengeance after a multi-film absence. His production is grandiose even by 007 standards, with floor-vibrating brass and orchestral stabs that pull Lana\u2019s typically apathetic delivery to the stratosphere. For both artists, it\u2019s the very definition of a statement.<\/p>\n Lana doesn\u2019t compromise her own sound to achieve that statement. If anything, \u201cFirst Light\u201d doubles as a retrospective of her career to this point. The Western-tinged guitar strokes that unfurl over the slow-simmering verses come just as much from Vic Flick, the guitarist behind Bond\u2019s iconic jangle, as they do from Lana\u2019s own Ultraviolence<\/em>. \u201cWest Coast\u201d and Sheryl Crow\u2019s \u201cTomorrow Never Dies\u201d are spiritual cousins, after all. The orchestral swells are rife with Bond motifs, but they\u2019re perhaps even more <\/em>indebted to Honeymoon<\/em>\u2019s cinematic ode to Italian melodrama. Bond has always been in Lana\u2019s blood, and it doesn\u2019t take reconstructive surgery to let it spill out over a sweeping three-and-a-half minutes of heaven.<\/p>\n But \u201cFirst Light,\u201d like so many of Lana Del Rey\u2019s longing songs, is not the sound of self-devotion. It is fully committed to the storied legacy of Bond themes, even to a fault. Lana, like so many legends before her, has the unenvious honor of trying to turn the game\u2019s vague title into poetic substance. \u201cRun into the sun like it’s the first light of day when you wake,\u201d she croons. \u201cIs it real or is it fake?\u201d It\u2019s a hollow rhyme fit for a Bond theme that needs to function as an overture to 007 First Light<\/em>\u2019s Bond origin story. The closest Lana comes to going full \u201cGoldfinger\u201d is in a melodically transcendent, but lyrically kitsch chorus that reminds you that this is a song for a video game. \u201cPeople try and stop you, all the fat\u0435s just watch you, dying just to know whether you’ll play your life like a game,\u201d she sings with a wink through the fourth wall. \u201cWill you play?\u201d<\/p>\n A hokey invitation, no doubt, but why not? \u201cThis is my idea of fun,\u201d Lana herself once crooned from a darkened SNL soundstage, decked out in her Saturday best. \u201cPlaying video games.\u201d<\/p>\n