There are a lot of songs out there these days about doing drugs, robbing people, killing the person your spouse cheated with you on, and all that.

I’ve also heard quite a few chilling songs about men killing their wives, such as 97′ Bonnie and Clyde by Eminem or Lay Down by Priestess.

But, among all of them, the most disturbing song I’ve ever heard is without a doubt Ultraviolence by Lana Del Rey.

For those of you who haven’t listened to it, it is basically a song about an abusive lover. However, that’s not what I find disturbing about it. What is so incredibly haunting to me about it is that, during the whole song, Lana is associating the acts of abuse with affection.

“He hit me but it felt like a kiss”

“I can hear sirens, sirens, he hurt me and it felt like true love”

“I can hear violins, violins, give me all of that ultraviolence”

“He taught me that loving him was never enough”

There is obviously a giant yikes factor to this song, the fact that it sounds like Lana is glamorizing abuse. But at first I thought that it may have been an intentionally ironic song, Lana is aware of how fucked up the message is and that she doesn’t actually believe the things she says in the song. The song is so twisted that it’s obvious she’s just writing in a hypothetical manner, kind of like how Eminem did in his Bonnie and Clyde song.

Until I read what she said about it in an interview.

“I like that luxe sound of the word ‘ultra’ and the mean sound of the word ‘violence’ together. I like a physical love, I like a hands-on love. How can I say this without getting into too much trouble? I like a tangible, passionate love. For me, if it isn’t physical, I’m not interested.”

Um, what?

But wait, it gets creepier.

Lana said that she didn’t write this song about a boyfriend, she wrote it about her former cult leader.

“I used to be a member of an underground sect which was reigned by a guru. He surrounded himself with young girls. He thought that he had to break people first to build them up again.”

She mentions the name Jim in the song, so it is suspected she is talking about Pacific Group, known for their cult-like behavior and ran by a man named Jim, which Lana had joined when she was young.

The whole song illustrates, quite vividly, the toxic little practices abusers do to maintain power over their victims. And how victims justify these acts as an expression of love. Throughout the song, Lana walks you through how she not only justifies the abuse, but sincerely believes that it’s good for her, singing in a soft voice that almost sounds like she’s in a dreamlike trance. It’s done so well and realistically that it’s quite haunting.

What disturbs me the most about it, however, is that the song wasn’t meant be to be a hypothetical story, an artistic portrayal of how abusive relationships work, or a message to victims in those types of situations to leave.

It was a song about a real mentality Lana had and real things she was thinking while she was being abused.