When Halsey warns that an upcoming album of hers “is about feeling bad”, as she briefly did on a live stream back in December of 2023, there’s plenty of reason to be concerned. As the original queen of the 2014 Tumblr girls with flower crowns, ripped fishnets, and Manic Panic dye jobs, Halsey’s discography has been characterized by sadness, rage, and existential angst for a decade. Considering that hyperbole and melodrama have been staples in Halsey’s toolkit for creating cinematic universes for each of her previous four albums, referring to the overall emotional landscape of her newest record as simply “bad” is a drastic understatement.
On 4th September, Halsey announced her fifth studio album, The Great Impersonator. “I made this record in the space between life and death,” she admitted. This isn’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 wouldn’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 context that lends credence to The Great Impersonator‘s overarching concept: what if the Jersey-born Ashley Nicolette Frangipane had become the internationally best-selling alt-pop star Halsey not in the mid-2010s, as actually happened, but in the aughts, the 1990s, the 1980s, even the 1970s? It makes sense — when faced with disease and mortality, who wouldn’t imagine how things might’ve gone differently?
Exploring this question provided one of the most unique album rollouts in recent memory. In the 18 days counting down to The Great Impersonator’s release, Halsey teased each track one at a time alongside different immaculately recreated cosplays as different acts throughout the decades who inspired her. 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 aren’t meant to be 1:1 replicas. Instead, the album offers homage to the ways a lifetime of varied experiences and musical inspirations can overlap within one person.
Herein lies The Great Impersonator’s greatest strength: Halsey achieves a level of honesty so sprawling that it gives the record the ability to hold contradiction. Halsey has never needed anything more than a pen to debilitate her fans with heart-wrenching truths (check out her poetry collection I Would Leave Me If I Could if you want proof), but certain production choices underscore the music’s vulnerability to devastating effect. 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. Only Halsey could turn, as the title indicates, a literal rough draft into the emotional thesis of an entire project.
Splitting the LP’s interludes over three separate “Letters to God” — dated 1974, 1983, and 1998, and utilizing each decade’s respective trademark sonic attributes — is another poignant way to emphasize the record’s spirit of evolution. The tracks paint the story of a profoundly emotional youngster who goes from claiming, “I wanna be sick / I don’t wanna hurt, so get it over with quick,” to becoming a chronically ill adult who can’t help but wonder if their childhood self’s misery is somehow cosmically to blame 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 “I Believe in Magic”, Halsey sings about the difficulty of watching her mother grow older and how hard it is to accept that one day her son will think the same about her.
If coming to terms with the incessant passage of time and the fleeting nature of life wasn’t enough, Halsey complicates the issue further eight tracks later with “Hurt Feelings”, a song detailing her strained relationship with their father. “I can’t keep up the illusion or confirm your point of view / Oh, I can’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.
This definitive, bridge-burning sentiment is a far cry from just two album cycles ago; the final track on 2020’s Manic contains the line, “I’ve stared at the sky in Milwaukee and hoped that my father would finally call me.” 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 changing her mind about certain things, particularly people who have wronged her.
There was a period where Halsey believed The Great Impersonator would be the last record she made. The result is a reckoning with the space between her true self and her performing persona; as is highlighted on the back cover of physical album variants, this is a collection of songs “written by Ashley, starring Halsey”. Even in the brief moments throughout that feel lyrically cumbersome or overwrought (the Dolly Parton-inspired “Hometown” could be punchier if the chorus had a bit more variation, and the opening track, “The Only Living Girl in LA”, might benefit from some pruned verses), Halsey’s ability to follow any tendril of thought to almost surreal conclusions poetically serves as a reminder that when your death is looming like a countdown clock, resisting concision is an act of mind-bending faith.
While the world at large is fortunate still to have Halsey as an artist and an individual, The Great Impersonator envisions an alternate ending. The titular track, the final on the record, imagines Halsey dying in a car crash that results in their vehicle veering off the road. “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.”
In the age of a music industry that often valorizes virality over vigor, it’s unfortunately easy to imagine Halsey’s The Great Impersonator meeting a similar fate. There are no obvious radio hits, no sound bites that have taken TikTok by storm. 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.