Halsey says she had the coolest mom. “She’s a full-sleeve-tatted, tongue-pierced, five-foot-tall, grown-up punk woman,” says the artist born Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, “and she turned me on to the best music when I was a kid.”
In addition to playing the Cure and Joy Division, she allowed her daughter to express herself however the child saw fit, which meant dressing up in fishnet gloves and an Evanescence t-shirt as a preteen and booking shows at a bar in Allentown, Pennsylvania, as a teen. And when Halsey skipped class to hitch a ride to the Warped Tour, she was shocked to see her mom in the crowd. They spent the rest of the day together in the most pit. “Whatever I did, my mom never said, ‘What will people think?’ For better or worse, I feel like that’s something integral to my sense of identity.”
While admitting she had a fucked-up childhood in other ways, Halsey has been trying to disregard what people think throughout her chameleonic career, which has been defined by restless pop experimentation, unexpected collaborations (including with Trent Reznor on 2021’s epic If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power), and even some strong film work (most recently, a supporting role in MaXXXine).
On the other hand, Halsey’s smart, dense, often weird music has lately been overshadowed by the drama that continually dogs her. This past spring she released what should have been her triumphant comeback single, “Lucky,” which is not a cover of Britney Spears’ 2000 hit but something like a creative inversion. The backlash was swift, with Halsey’s own fans among the loudest voices criticizing her for… what, exactly? Halsey responded by describing a contingent of her own fanbase as “hands down meaner to me than any other people on the planet.”
But Halsey has managed to transform her disaffection into ambitious alternative pop on her new album, The Great Impersonator, which is defined by its musical mercuriality. Halsey transmogrifies from goth-rock queen to girl-group crooner, from riot grrl to confessional folkie, from Joni and Janis to Courtney and PJ. She’s a different Halsey on every song, and each one comes across as a reluctant pop star who finds no pleasure in her own fame.
“There are a lot of rock-leaning songs on the album, but I feel like it’s a pretty fair balance of different genres,” she says. “At this point genre isn’t something I think about when I make a song, because it transforms so much along the way. Sometimes it really is like: Okay, what does it sound like if Halsey does the Postal Service? Or what does it sound like it Halsey does the Cranberries? These are all concepts for me to mess around with.”
Like so much of the ‘90s music she’s messing around with, The Great Impersonator is an album full of angst and confusion, although it’s usually directed inward, toward those different versions of herself: the music nerd, the ambitious pop auteur, the mother, the daughter, and most of all the celebrity. “I was writing this album as I was staring down my twenties like the barrel of a gun,” she says. “I guess it’s an exploration of that, because as a female artist you’re constantly confronted with the idea that you’ll get too old to write with angst and rage and sarcasm and longing.”
Halsey sings about her health problems on a painfully whimsical acoustic song called “The End” (she was diagnosed with systemic lupus erythematosus and a rare T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder, both of which are in remission). Unsurprisingly, death looms over every song: On “Only Living Girl in L.A.,” Halsey tells her mother she thought she’d die at 27, “and in a way I kinda did.” She also admits that she couldn’t sell out her own funeral. “I’ve made the joke to my loved ones that if I died, at least one person would make a meme of it. That’s just the nature of the way this thing operates.”
As dark as they may be at times, these songs are Halsey’s way of embracing that confusion as a vital part of herself. “There comes a point when everybody says, ‘You’re a mom. You’re not allowed to be a disaster. You have to have it all figured out.’ But those feelings never leave us. We’re just told we’re not allowed to express them anymore, because it’s unbecoming.”
