Like so many post-MTV pop stars who elevate image cultivation to a discrete art form, Lana Del Rey is at her best in music videos. While her songwriting recipe hasn’t changed much over the years (sad girls + Americana + string sections + quotes from other famous songs), her artistry has slowly revealed itself in a series of promo clips and short films that registered the evolution of what once appeared to be an absurdly thin persona. We’re no closer to knowing the real Lizzy Grant than we were almost six years ago, when “Video Games” premiered, but the 25 videos she's released since achieving fame as Lana Del Rey have endowed her alter ego with more depth than once seemed possible.

Now, she’s preparing to release her fourth album, Lust for Life, next month. Naturally, she's pushing her aesthetic forward with a few new videos, so it seemed time to have a look back at the LDR persona on film.

“Video Games” (2011)

Most of us got our first glimpse of Lana Del Rey in this self-directed video, which juxtaposes pouty closeups of the singer with nostalgic shots of Hollywood landmarks, American flags, mid-century home movies, and black-and-white footage of skater boys. At first glance, “Video Games” seems shoddily constructed and a touch juvenile, like a Pinterest board collecting all the images Del Rey hoped to incorporate into her nascent persona. Even her smartest critics found her campy in an unintentional, trying-too-hard way at first.

But if you look closely enough at “Video Games,” you’ll see that Del Rey has always been cannier than she let on. Mixed in with all that Instagram-friendly imagery of pretty Lana and idyllic California is a clip of the deeply intoxicated actress Paz de la Huerta falling over in a beaded gown, as paparazzi halfheartedly mumble “You OK?” and keep snapping photos. Considering we’re looking at de la Huerta—a minor actress whose drunken antics had already made her a cultural punchline by 2011—rather than, say, Marilyn Monroe, this isn’t a vision of glamorous dissipation. Like the lyric “It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you” repeated in a listless monotone, the de la Huerta nod suggests that even a pre-fame Lana Del Rey understood Hollywood to be just as cruel and humiliating as it is alluring.

“Born to Die” (2011)

Del Rey used to bill herself as a “gangster Nancy Sinatra”, a phrase that evoked some combination of big hair, vintage dresses, and the frisson of danger inherent in depictions of organized crime, from Scarface to American Gangster. She played that persona to the hilt in her first big-budget video, for the title track of her debut album, Born to Die. Shot at France’s Palace of Fontainebleau and directed by Yoann Lemoine (who recently made Harry Styles fly in “Sign of the Times”), it intersperses shots of Del Rey on a throne, flanked by tigers, with flashbacks to a date with a tattoo-covered boyfriend that turns deadly. She’s in the afterlife now, is the eventual implication, a martyr to romance in a flowing white dress and flower crown.