There is plenty of cause for concern when Halsey asserts that her upcoming album is” about feeling poor,” as she momentarily did on a life flow back in December of 2023. As the original wife of the 2014 Tumblr girls with plant crowns, ripped fishnets, and Manic Panic colour jobs, Halsey‘s album has been characterized by grief, hatred, and existential anxiety for a century. It is an insult to refer to the overall mental landscape of Halsey‘s most recent album as merely “bad” in light of the fact that hyperbole and melodrama have been a staple in Halsey‘s toolkit for creating visual universes for each of her past four albums.
On 4th September, Halsey announced her fifth studio album, The Great Impersonator. ” I made this report in the area between life and death”, she admitted. This is n’t a metaphor: within the past few years, Halsey was diagnosed with both lupus and leukemia and has confessed that there was a time she was worried she would n’t be alive to see the record’s release. ( This gives an entirely new meaning to the pink T-shirt offered recently in her online merch store, now sold out, which reads,” I REMEMBER HALSEY”. )
This is the environment that lends credence to The Great Impersonator‘s overall principle: what if the Jersey-born Ashley Nicolette Frangipane had become the worldwide best-selling alt-pop sun Halsey not in the mid-2010s, as actually happened, but in the aughts, the 1990s, the 1980s, yet the 1970s? It makes sense — when faced with disease and mortality, who would n’t imagine how things might’ve gone differently?
One of the most intriguing record rollouts in new memory was produced by exploring this problem. In the 18 weeks leading up to the release of The Great Impersonator, Halsey teased each record one at a time alongside various flawlessly recreated cosplays as different functions who served as her inspiration throughout the years. Though some sonic through lines are distinctly easy to trace, like Fiona Apple‘s influence on” Arsonist”, or the Bruce Springsteen-eqsue opening to” Letter to God ( 1983 )”, these songs are n’t meant to be 1: 1 replicas. Otherwise, the album pays homage to how a lifetime of different experiences and musical influences can intertwine with one person.
Above lies The Wonderful Impersonator’s greatest power: Halsey achieves a level of honesty so sprawling that it gives the document the ability to maintain contradiction. If you want proof that she has never needed anything but a pen to debilitate her fans, Halsey has never had to ( see her poetry collection I Would Leave Me If I Could ) ), but some production choices have the power to starkly highlight the vulnerability of the music. In” Life of the Spider ( Draft )”, shaking, echoey vocals over a single piano track, recorded in a single take, give the impression of a desperate voice memo in all the best, rawest ways. Just Halsey could change, as the name indicates, a precise rough draft into the mental thesis of an overall project.
Splitting the LP’s interludes over three individual” Letters to God” — dated 1974, 1983, and 1998, and utilizing each season’s respected brand sound attributes— is another profound way to emphasize the record’s spirit of evolution. The tracks depict a profoundly emotional youngster who transitions from claiming to be sick or not want to hurt to becoming a chronically ill adult who ca n’t help but wonder if their childhood self’s misery is somehow cosmically responsible for their current ailments.
Grappling with her own mortality is, for Halsey, inextricable from thoughts of parenthood. It’s a topic she’s explored in depth, her previous record, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, described as being about” the joys and horrors of pregnancy and childbirth”. On The Great Impersonator, however, she flips the camera a bit, examining her role as a mother and daughter. In Halsey’s song” I Believe in Magic,” Halsey talks about the difficulty of watching her mother get older and how difficult it is to accept that her son will feel the same way about her.
If accepting the incessant passage of time and the fleeting nature of life was n’t enough, Halsey adds another eight tracks later with” Hurt Feelings,” a song describing her strained relationship with her father. ” I ca n’t keep up the illusion or confirm your point of view/ Oh, I ca n’t bear to fake a smile when you walk into the room”, she sings, her light and airy vocals transforming into something grittier, dripping with betrayal.
The final track of 2020’s Manic features the line,” I’ve stared at the sky in Milwaukee and hoped that my father would finally call me,” and it’s a far cry from just two album cycles ago. But by the time fans reach” Hurt Feelings” on The Great Impersonator ( assuming they’ve listened in order ), Halsey has already detailed her struggles with isolation, postpartum depression, heartbreak, grief, objectification, losing a pet, and life-threatening sickness. One can forgive her for having a different opinion on certain things, especially those who have wronged her.
Halsey grew up believing that The Great Impersonator would be her final record. As is noted on the back cover of physical album variants, this collection of songs “written by Ashley, starring Halsey” is a reckoning with the gap between her real self and her performing persona. When a death is looming like a countdown clock, resisting concision is an act of mind-bending faith, even in the brief moments that feel lyrically cumbersome or overwrought ( the Dolly Parton-inspired” Hometown” could be punchier if the chorus had a little more variation, and the opening track,” The Only Living Girl in LA,” might benefit from some pruned verses ).
The Great Impersonator envisions an alternate ending, though the rest of the world is fortunate to still have Halsey as an artist and person. The final track on the record, which depicts Halsey dying in a car accident that causes their car to veer off the road, is the title track. ” I’m in a pick-up truck, the door is stuck, I’m sinking in the water/ And the girl inside is waving”, she croons in something akin to fascination before being forced to conclude:” but the people just applaud her”.
Unfortunately, it’s not all that uncommon for Halsey’s The Great Impersonator to experience in the era of a music industry that frequently prioritizes virality over vigor. There are no overt radio hits or sound bites that have blown TikTok away. But this is not an album designed to be a chart-topper, it’s a masterclass in the ways we use art to survive—which is to say, a masterclass in honesty.