GTA 6 NEWS · MUSIC & RADIO

She Sang “Video Games” — Now Lana Del Rey Lives Inside the Biggest Game on Earth

In 2012, a singer-songwriter named Lana Del Rey released her major-label debut Born to Die, an album anchored by a slow, cinematic ballad called “Video Games.” It made her a star. Fourteen years later, the circle has closed in the most perfectly Rockstar way imaginable: Lana Del Rey is now a character inside Grand Theft Auto 6 — the game already expected to be the biggest entertainment launch in history — and she cannot wait to play it herself.

Speaking to Rolling Stone as part of the magazine’s coverage of GTA 6’s newly revealed radio stations, the 11-time Grammy nominee made it clear this is not just another licensing deal to her. “On so many different levels this is super special and a privilege,” Del Rey said. “Can’t wait to get into the game and start playing.”

GameSpot picked the quotes up on October 9, and the internet did what the internet does with a headline this good: the singer of “Video Games” is heading inside a video game — the new one, the enormous one, the one that lands on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S on November 19 after a development stretch that began all the way back in 2015.

What Happened: Delta Dawne Speaks

Here’s the setup, in case you missed this week’s radio blowout. Rockstar revealed the first six in-game radio stations of Grand Theft Auto 6 on the game’s official site, each with hosts, genre descriptors, and streaming previews — and the host list read like a festival lineup: Bad Bunny, Morgan Wallen, Burna Boy, Robyn, Trick Daddy, Trina, and two founding members of Slayer. We broke the full dial down in our complete station guide, including the series-first detail that radio now follows you out of the car and onto the street through headphones and earbuds.

Del Rey and Wallen co-host Back Country Radio, the outlaw-country station, under the on-air aliases Delta Dawne and MW. And in a detail that sounds like a Rockstar writers’ room joke but is completely real, Del Rey’s husband — Louisiana airboat captain Jeremy Dufrene — voices a station regular named Mud Dog Mike, described by Rockstar (per Kotaku) as Back Country’s “roving reporter, swamp meteorologist, and Delta’s not-so-secret lover.” Rolling Stone notes the airboat-captain part isn’t even a stretch: Dufrene is one in real life.

The Rolling Stone interview is the first time any of the six stations’ celebrity hosts has spoken on the record about the gig — and Del Rey’s answers make clear she arrives as a longtime player, not a tourist.

From “Video Games” to Video Games

The symmetry is doing a lot of work online, and honestly, it earns it. “Video Games” was Del Rey’s breakthrough — a mournful, cinematic single that spread across the internet in 2011 and anchored Born to Die, eventually going multi-platinum and topping charts across Europe. It is not, strictly speaking, a song about gaming; the nostalgia in it is more about a kind of Americana than any console. But the title alone was enough: for a generation of listeners, Lana Del Rey and “video games” became the same search.

Her fandom, though, is the real thing, and it predates the casting by years. “One of the coolest things about this is the fact that the first time some of our family got to LA they actually knew the roads because of playing the game,” she told Rolling Stone — a nod to the series’ fictional Los Santos, the Los Angeles stand-in that players have navigated by muscle memory since 2013. Her family learned a real city from a Grand Theft Auto map. That is not a celebrity endorsement quote. That is a household of actual players.

Then there’s the country angle. Back Country Radio specializes in classic and outlaw country — the previews feature David Allan Coe’s “Need a Little Time Off for Bad Behavior,” Loretta Lynn’s “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” and the Hank Williams Jr. and Waylon Jennings duet “The Conversation.” A decade ago, casting Lana Del Rey against that backdrop would have been a curveball. Today it’s practically typecasting: she has spent recent years leaning hard into country music — teasing a country-inspired album — while building a second-home life in Louisiana with Dufrene. Delta Dawne might be the least fictional character she has ever played.

What This Means for GTA 6

First: this is casting, not licensing. Rockstar didn’t just clear a Lana Del Rey song for the soundtrack — it wrote her into the world as a radio persona, with her husband playing a recurring bit character. All six revealed stations follow the same pattern: Bad Bunny and RaiNao as El Martillo and La Gata on Cocoteo FM, Robyn and Alex Consani on pop flagship Flash FM, Trick Daddy and Trina on Dirty South Classics, Burna Boy and DJ Palms Trax on AfroBank FM, and Slayer’s Kerry King and Tom Araya fronting metal station The Chamber 106.6. These are characters with formats, not playlists with names attached.

Second: it’s a music operation at a scale GTA has never attempted. The in-game dial is only half of it — there’s also the 34-track original album arriving November 19, the same day as the game, where Morgan Wallen’s contribution “Last Thing You Need” has already debuted at No. 9 on the Hot 100, alongside new music from Keith Richards, Travis Scott and more. Spotify has been running GTA 6 billboards in Los Angeles and New York. When the soundtrack machinery starts charting before the game is even out, the radio hosts stop being flavor and start being distribution.

Third — and this is the part longtime fans keep coming back to — the precedent is older than most of the player base. GTA’s radio has been a character since 2002’s Vice City, where Flash FM and the rest of the dial did as much world-building as any mission. Flash FM is even back for the sequel. In this series, music was never a feature — it’s the memory players keep.

And the celebrity-excitement thermometer keeps climbing. A couple of weeks ago it was Kit Harington — not a gamer, but openly GTA 6-curious. Now a Grammy-decorated headliner is saying she can’t wait to get into the game — on the record, while playing a character in it. When the people inside the industry’s biggest product are this openly hyped to become customers too, November 19 is going to be a very strange day.

One Month Out

GTA 6 launches November 19, 2026 on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S — confirmed, locked, and now surrounded by a marketing universe that includes real-world Miami signage, charting singles, and Lana Del Rey’s swamp-radio husband. If you haven’t secured a copy yet, you can pre-order GTA 6 for PS5 on Amazon or grab the Xbox version here. And if the wait is the hard part, our things-to-do-while-waiting guide just got a new entry: listen to the six station previews and pick your station before launch day.

She sang the world sad about video games in 2012. In November, she’ll be one of the voices coming out of the radio while you drive through Leonida. Some careers simply rhyme.

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Related reading: Every revealed GTA 6 radio station · GTA 6’s 34-track album, explained · Spotify’s GTA 6 billboards · Music in Vice City, from Love Fist to today