The Great Impersonator

The Great Impersonator

Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024

Halsey

When she emerged from obscurity as a 19-year-old vagabond turned overnight SoundCloud star, Halsey was something of a cipher: You knew her voice (one of the 2010s’ prime examples of “cursive singing”), but very little else. “I think there is a little bit of a grand narrative about me that’s like, ‘I don’t know what she looks like. I couldn’t recognize her on the street because she looks different every time I see her,’” the singer tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “Some people get into a creative medium and have a very specific style: ‘This is what works for me, this is who I am and what I’m comfortable with.’ And for me, I just don’t know that it’s fun unless I’m reinventing. I think a lot of people see that and get the sense that I don’t have a very secure sense of self.”

In one sense, the lead single from her fifth studio album shows she’s as hard to pin down as ever: For one, she was beginning with “The End.” An unplugged folk ballad co-produced by Alex G and Michael Uzowuru, the song shed light on recent health scares she’d been keeping under wraps. But The Great Impersonator is vulnerable in a new way, using the concept of homage as a lens through which to write—hence the series of photos Halsey released leading up to the album’s release in which she posed as David Bowie, Aaliyah, Kate Bush, and more. “As I get older, I love to write about myself, but I find it boring to talk about myself,” she says. “So these reinventions give me these little means of escapism—not in the sense of running away, but just telling the story in a different way.”

Themes of identity, mortality, and legacy snake through the album’s 18 tracks, which channel ’70s folk, ’80s power ballads, ’90s alt-rock, and 2000s pop before arriving at the decade in which Halsey herself emerged. At times she reels at her own temporary nature; elsewhere, she craves depersonalization: “I think that I should try to kill my ego/’Cause if I don’t, my ego might kill me,” she yelps on the PJ Harvey-inspired “Ego.” “Hometown” is an ode to Dolly Parton, though it’s Springsteen-esque (“Glory Days” in particular) in its depiction of faded American dreams. And on “Lucky,” she riffs on the Britney Spears hit of the same name, one of the great pop ballads on fame’s diminishing returns.

“I turned 20 as BADLANDS came out, and I’m turning 30 as this record comes out,” Halsey says, tracing the arc of her career. “I had this 10-year plan, but I didn’t really have anything beyond that. I hadn’t really thought about what was going to happen.” And though she may not know where life will take her in the next 10 years, she’s focused on appreciating the journey rather than racing towards the finish line. “I used to look at the way that SZA or Frank [Ocean] make records like, ‘Gosh, I could never spend two or three years on an album. I’m so impulsive and impatient and I just want to get it done,’” she says. “Then I spent a long time writing this record and I understood for the first time—oh, the making is the best part.”