Lana Del Rey’s New Zach Bryan Collaboration is a Sign of What’s Coming From Her Country Album, ‘Stove’

Lana Del Rey has teased a new song with Zach Bryan, seemingly titled ‘Whale’. With Lana's long-teased country album, Stove, on the horizon, this link-up feels like our biggest clue yet of what we can expect from the pop phenom's forthcoming project.

The ‘Video Games’ hitmaker has taken to Instagram to share some behind-the-scenes clips of her and Zach, with the latter showing her an array of paintings by Melinda Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick has become known for her whale-inspired artwork, which she creates with her husband Doug, with Lana thanking her for the art in her post.

Lana shares how she and her husband were joined by Zach and his wife, Samantha, in Massachusetts, “Whale, we finally got our song done. And that’s no Lie...not only that Zach, Sam and Shelby went to great lengths to get down to Massachusetts while we were up here working to bring back Mother whale and moonlight roll on”.

The chart-topping hitmaker goes on, “If you know, you know. Melinda and Doug are so aspirational. I also love their substack. I can’t wait to get down to say hi ourselves, I just wanna say thank you so much to them for working with us to get something that our fam is gonna treasure forever. I also wanna think thank Jeff from Epilogues in Bristol for a couple of our other pieces. much love to everyone”.

It's no surprise that Zach was keen to work with Lana, with the ‘Something in the Orange’ singer-songwriter having covered Lana's global hit ‘Video Games’ back in July 2023.

But this surprise link-up does, it seems, give us a strong indication of what we can expect from Stove, and perhaps even the project's companion album, which is rumoured to be called Spyda. Lana confirmed she'd made a second project, in tandem with the initially unveiled Stove, with the vinyl image of a boat with ‘Spyda’ on it leading many fans and outlets to assume this is the name of the other album.

Lana's foray into country has been a long time coming, with the New York native first announcing the project - then called Lasso - back in February 2024, while reflecting on how the industry is shifting towards the genre at a pre-GRAMMYs event.

She's since taken the stage with artists from every corner of ‘country’, including Lainey Wilson, Lukas Nelson, Paul Cauthen, Megan Moroney and Jelly Roll, Nikki Lane and Meg Mcree.

This has left fans scratching their heads as to whether Stove will lean more towards the mainstream Nashville sound, or whether it will explore the alt-country and Americana impulses Lana that has hinted at utilising in the past. Now, with Lana teasing this new Zach Bryan collaboration, it looks like we finally have our answer.

Zach is famously anti-Nashville and anti-Country Radio, with the ‘Oklahoma Smokeshow’ crooner regularly eschewing the traditional Music City pathways and establishments.

What's more, the fact that Lana appears to have been recording a portion of Stove in Massachusetts again hints that she's not gone down the Post Malone route of basing herself in Nashville, and drawing on an array of mainstream country collaborators.

That being said, judging by how prominent Nashville songwriters like Jessie Jo Dillon, Shane McAnally and Luke Robert have been showing support to Lana in her comments, it seems we could potentially see some Music City penmanship on pockets of Stove. It just feels like the overall aesthetic will be one that is unmistakably Lana, rather than country in the traditional, steel-soaked, honky-tonkin’ sense.

Even the singles that Lana has released so far, like ‘Henry, come on’, ‘Bluebird’ and ‘White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter’, only really feel loosely ‘country’, and stick to the genre-blurring maverick's signature dream-like, ethereal and otherworldly ambience.

Especially given how Lana has repeatedly stressed that she feels like her sound has always been somewhat country and Americana-influence, it seems Stove and Spyda will be continuations of her classic aesthetic, rather than a major departure. It's true that, given how mercurial he can be in those alt-country and indie-folk spaces, it wouldn't have been unheard of for Zach Bryan to appear on an OG Lana album.

Thus, it seems Lana's foray into country music won't be a seismic moment that has any dramatic impact on Nashville, rather, it feels like it will be a project that sees Lana delving deeper into the DNA of ‘Henry, come on’ and ‘Bluebird’, and shrugging playfully at the Nashville scene as she winks, “See, I told you I was always country”.

This newly announced collaboration with Zach, therefore, feels like the final piece of the puzzle and the confirmation we've all been waiting for as to the core sound of Stove.