Excerpt: Lana Del Rey, born Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, is an 11-time Grammy-nominated American singer-songwriter, known for her melancholic depiction of America across landscapes of Las Vegas, New York and Old Hollywood. Central to her early albums Born to Die (2011), and Paradise (2012) is an exploration of American identity through the lens of longing, loss, and nostalgia. An abundance of academic analysis has centered around Del Rey’s music and Americana aesthetic as a critical performance of the neoliberal American dream (Crutcher 2019; Usmar 2014; Nurani & Ananda 2025; Kruger 2025). However, I argue that despite the transformative potential of Del Rey’s work, her discography ultimately perpetuates settler-colonial power structures and imaginaries through a nostalgic idealization of America and white femininity founded on colonial violence.