Lies

“Lies” arrives on Zach Bryan’s Young Manhood & Other Donatable Organs EP as the most immediately striking thing on it, mostly because of who’s singing the second verse. Lana Del Rey’s country turn has been building since 2024’s Lasso, and pairing her with Bryan – a songwriter whose entire career runs on unvarnished, lived-in delivery – is a legible decision on paper: two artists whose current moment both happen to be pointed at the same genre, from opposite directions. On record, the pairing mostly works. Del Rey and Bryan wrote the song together, and their voices sit against gentle piano and shimmering strings in a way that favors atmosphere over momentum, each singer trading lines about a relationship they both know is built on a comfortable fiction rather than fighting each other for space.

The complication is the chorus, which quotes Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies” closely enough that the connection isn’t a subtle homage so much as a stated fact of the song’s construction, and the piano intro’s resemblance to Rihanna’s “Stay” compounds the sense that “Lies” is working from other people’s blueprints rather than building its own. That’s not automatically a problem – plenty of great songs quote their influences openly – but it does raise the bar for what the song needs to do with the borrowed material, and “Lies” mostly just sits inside it rather than transforming it into something that couldn’t have existed without this specific pairing. The reaction has split roughly along that fault line: listeners hearing a genuinely pretty, well-sung duet on one side, and listeners hearing a song whose chorus was the easy part because someone else already wrote it on the other. One widely shared complaint – that it “almost felt like Lana could’ve just said no to this collab” – reads less like a verdict on the performances, which are genuinely good, and more like disappointment that the song didn’t ask more of either artist.

Commercially, none of that ambivalence has slowed it down – “Lies” hit No. 1 on Apple Music’s own songs chart, passing Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” in the process, and its Hot 100 debut at No. 4 confirms real crossover appetite for whatever this collaboration is selling. What it’s selling, mostly, is vibe: two recognizable voices, a classic-rock quotation doing some of the emotional labor a new melody usually has to do alone, and just enough genuine chemistry between Bryan and Del Rey to make the shortcut forgivable rather than fatal.

6.8/10 – a lovely-sounding collaboration that leans on someone else’s chorus more than it should, saved by two voices that actually sound like they wanted to be in the same room.

Hero image: “Lies” single art, Warner Records. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.