I Listened to Halsey’s ‘The Great Impersonator’.

Artist: Halsey
Album: The Great Impersonator
Release Date: October 25, 2024
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Leading up to the release of this record, I’ve been worried that there’s been no consistent message surrounding it. While there have been darker-leaning themes, sonically I feel like there is a very difficult bridge to cross from one track to the next. I understand that this is likely because it takes DNA from many artists, many eras, many folds in the mind of the artist to create a tribute to all of the ways that she’s been inspired by those that came before to establish that which now exists. I think I like all the singles, I think they’re all “good”. But my biggest hesitation to the varied enjoyments I’ve had is that in whole, I’m not [yet] a Halsey fan. I like her 2021 record, If I Can’t Have Love I Want Power and through that I’ve understood that record’s power, that record’s boldness of creation. In fact, I love that record. And through the window which that record opened, I have seen Halsey as an artist and a performer as someone who has a true command over the many personae she’s embodied, and someone who has the integrity to stick to their convictions even if it means losing credibility, a record label and public perception. Listening to this one is a new experience for me, as it’s going into her work with a little less buffer surrounding it. This record is giving me a more direct line to their essence, a singular through-line to their output. I don’t know how this will sit in the pantheon of their other records as I’ve never even heard them before.

As it stands, sitting through the first run through of the record, “scattered” is exactly the sensation I felt. This is a house of cards that’s been mashed, each level pulled down from the next in a maelstrom of variety. For over an hour, we hear songs that do rare work in being “catchy”. It doesn’t reach to establish “hooks” or to be listened to for enjoyment. There are pop tracks mixed into the fray which act as razors to cut up the powder into straight lines, but for the most part these are stark hits, snuff after snuff, of bleak anxiety and depression. Listening to this record doesn’t feel good.

I think the opener, ‘Only Living Girl In LA’ is one of those songs that establishes that sentiment perfectly. Most of the song, I was waiting for the wave to crash and to find it turning into something that became less of a story than a song, and when it does in the end, the song gave me a big realization that it required my tacit attention. It commanded my focus through attrition, as I had to restart the song once I realized it was unspooling to me a narrative. And I find that this practice of tunneling into these songs with all segments of my brain in focus is going to be the vehicle which helps the record arrive as opposed to trying to “catch a vibe” with it and figuring out which songs are going to be favorites and then filling in the cracks. This is not a record for the ADHD generation. It reminds me in function (less form) of Taylor Swift’s recent Tortured Poets Department in that it requests your attention of it as more than a collection of songs, but instead as a series of dialogs and expositions on the artist as opposed to by the artist.

I know almost immediately that I have to leave IICHLIWP in the rearview. This is not that album. This is not that Halsey. But which Halsey is it? She’s openly advertised and telegraphed that this record is going to see her slipping into the skins and the minds of 18 different artists (including herself), as she ‘impersonates’ them and the way in which she created their songs. I think there’s such an interesting table set in this manner as the way that I perceive some of my favorites (David Bowie, Fiona Apple and Björk for example) can be extraordinarily different than others do. Memories, muse and magic are all crafted through varied flavors of nostalgia and we project these waves of recollection on walls of varied angles and shape and size so the image we find is altered and bent and shaded in different ways. So, too, is the ways that we express ourselves even when we aren’t trying to bare our influences. Even while trying to make a song in the vein of these artists, she can still remain at times unrecognizable for me the listener, but may feel like it completely embodied their entire aura through creation. While some of them feel “right” (‘Panic Attack’ as Stevie Nicks) some of them I’m kind of thrown off by (‘Ego’ as Dolores O’Riordan). I think a lot has been said surrounding how she’s used these people as sign posts so this is the last I’ll illustrate it, but I think it’s important to understand that while creating an 18 TRACK 66 MINUTE record, it’s okay to find new faces, new voices, new designs, new roots.

Throughout the record, we hear about motherhood and the creation of human life as a pivotal point in their life. And I think the ability to not only personify but to manifest that in the voice of their child throughout the record is impactful. The boy’s presence gives a sense of joy that runs in and out like daydreams tied around a finger. It feels joyous, organic, almost amniotic as they present in a faded form, almost unproduced, like home movies playing in another room . There’s a oneness there. Hearing Halsey speak to him in unironic and unembarrassed tones, a mother’s joy and a child’s wonder blending into some kind of mystical tapestry impossible to falsely manufacture. ‘I Believe In Magic’ reflects on what it means to be a mother and to have these kinds of revelations, but also peeks back at the way we perceive our parents when we’re at a young age, and how we spend a lot of time internally repaving those roads once we see the caustic nature of what it means to be a human grown old.

‘Ego’, ‘Lucky’ and ‘Lonely Is the Muse’ act as the pop song entries to this album, and I feel like they’re all solid, but all somehow act as distractions to the bigger picture thematics going on. ‘Ego’ is a blast, it’s huge, it’s fun. I think if there’s only one song to pull from this record and show someone uninterested in the bigger picture, ‘Ego’ would be the one to share, though I also think it would be missing the point. ‘Lucky’ carries a greater deal of the burden of the message of this record, but it does so in a far more disguised and subversive way. It conveys the metaphor perfectly, delivering a cautionary tale of Stardom’s Dread in the form of a pretty pill that’s all too easily ingested. Using Britney Spears as the frequency for transmission is all too fitting. I think ‘Lonely Is the Muse’ is so close to being a great return to a rock track for her, but I just don’t think it was in capable hands, as I wish the guitars were heavier, louder. The fuzz turned up just a bit more. This is a song that sits on the precipice of Halsey-gaze, but because it doesn’t turn that corner into a more composed execution it feels like it just doesn’t deliver itself as a complete thought. Her screaming these lyrics at the end promises that she was completely engaged in the creation of this song, too, so I know there is something so close to being delivered here. I think, too, it suffers from sitting in that middle ground of a long record, a difficult record so it kind of becomes lost amidst the winding library of tomes.

A great majority of the songs on this record are stripped down and do a fantastic job highlighting Halsey’s voice and more importantly her lyrics. This album is a necessary catharsis for her. Pianos, guitars, light drum tracks are the premise for so many of these songs and it’s a perfect way to be manipulated into different vessels for the myriad darknesses that Halsey needs to release from herself and to store on a shelf. All of the health scares and uncertainty about how her body was revolting against her needed to be released. All of the stories of the aggressive dominance from her previous partner needed to be documented, illustrated, drained and exorcized.

And of all of these stripped songs, there are few that act as small-voiced as ‘The End’, which may be my favorite of this variety on this record. Certainly one of my favorite songs of the year. It was the first taste of the record that we got, and I was immediately hit by just how dark the song was and how out of its own control it was. Where I had previously known Halsey to take the challenges she was faced by the throat, there was very little true vulnerability that I found in the previous record. As I said early on, this is not that record. This song floats through a decimated landscape, minimizing all sensation of hope of ability to move forward. But there’s a hazy lightness lying just beyond all of it, a questioning of a new kind of love that warns of the barbs that she bears and the misconceptions she has of herself and how she’s been fed a million reasons to not be worthy. Despite the bleakness, the ravaged plains she portrays, there’s a nascent seed of early trust, early love, that’s so miraculous, so pure. I think the lack of bombast, the lack of enormity really speaks to the glowing ember that she has been cupping in her hands, the glimmer in her eye that she never thought would find an end to the terror.

I’m not sure if it’s emotional exhaustion or breaching the satiety of consumption here, but there are a few tracks that start to feel a little overwrought. I like the ooh’s in ‘Hometown’, but I’m not sure that the emotional heft of not wanting to come back to where you grew up matches the density of the rest of the record, so it sort of floats away for me, along with the Swift-sounding ‘I Never Loved You’ which lacks the specificity of many of the other confessionals. The meandering of ‘Darwinism’ is abstract enough to feel satellistic in its spacial orbiting, but I think it lacks a musically distinct punch, somehow drifting into Lana vocal territory at times (but not quite fully committed to) and the cosmic dissolving of aural spectra in the soundscapes built behind the voice. I adore the way she closes the song, as the final verse seems to take on a Kubrickian spiral as she grows more lonely and more alien in her descent, crushing and burning in her final atmospheric reentry.

‘Arsonist’ is my favorite song on the record, at the very least sonically. It’s got a trip-hop vibe to it, laid back beats and lo-fi synths bobbing and pulsing along as the vocals roll their eyes into the back of their skull and entrances the listener through repetition and shimmering underwater writhing. She does all of the work on this track through contortion and invitation and rejection and consummation. This has a dark heat to it, a slinking siren summoning its target into a void. In the end, we’re faced with a simple voice, a simple dictation, a question. This song’s power, its ownership of the blame it places, its condemnation of its subject is so complete. It devotes itself to a final breakdown of the narrator’s captor. The song which follows, though, ‘Life of the Spider (Draft)’, confesses the lowest points of what brought her to this place. If ‘Arsonist’ is the victorious climax, ‘Life of the Spider’ is the origin story, and all that came before.

‘Life of the Spider’ is the title of the song, but it’s followed by a parenthetical annotation that it’s only a draft of the song. As the story goes, it’s the only time she was able to perform this song as it acts as too vehement a reminder of a time she’s left behind. It acts as an admission of a way she was forced to live. And revisiting this level of diminishing, belittling behavior is almost more defeating to examine than direct violence. Listening to this song illustrates a helix of a refracted existence. She exists with an illness and is being decimated by her body, decimated by a partner who is sick of watching her be sick, a partner who has lost the patience for her even existing. If there is a connection to be believed between the body and the mind, then this is a parable about how one will devour the next in an endless ouroboros of defeat brought on by a person so intent on dominating someone into submission that they have turned an abode into a prison.

This record talks about being nailed to the ground by your health often, but over three songs it talks about people who inflict fear and weakness through the terrorization. Even benign livelihood feels injected with a joyless brutality, ferocity, that denies a common joy. Whether its her partner who kept her living in a day-to-day life of guilt for what she was inflicted with, for who she was, or a father who forever changed her perception of not only the men in her life, but also of herself and what exactly she was accountable for.

This record acts as a reflection over a massive scope for a woman who seems to have experienced it all. Becoming a household name, a massive pop star at immense personal cost. It feels like maybe she chased this lifestyle as an escape from a world of bottomed out possibilities, which not only caused her to fall into spiritual debt to the World of Fame, but also directly into the mouth of a terrible abyss in the shape of a man who turned her inside out, emptied of hope and possibility.

The ‘Letter to God’ series is so powerful in the way that we revisit our deepest fears as we hopscotch through the calendar days. There are ways to find distraction, ways to find faith and joy. There are days, months where we find new identities. Decades where we embody reinvention. But the hook of the song we’ve written about the darkest part of ourselves remains the same, no matter how the years have changed the music.

In the closing track, the title track, the plucking of string instruments married with big electronic hums is meant to invoke the enormity of the same nature spirit which Björk summons in many of her earliest songs. I think there’s something important about this association in that Björk (for me) has always represented some kind of immortal feminine divinity to me, something powerful and loud and fearless. I think this is something that Halsey has been seeking, has been missing, in order to shake free the webs which she’s been imprisoned by. I think the almost candid and carefree, joyous ah-AH sounds that she throws in represent a dashing of the chains she’s been held by, shows that she’s no longer keeping score by any previous means. She’s not concerned with what the song sounds like, she’s not concerned with what the aesthetic begs for. She is free. She is open. She is alive.

This is a different record if you listen to it with your ears and if you listen to it with your heart. I don’t know if I would choose to listen to this record often. It feels more like a book you read than an album you choose. I made the mistake of making my first listen a time split between two car rides and sort of running my hands across the surface, kind of like speedrunning a museum tour. When I sat back down with it a second time, its themes and its messages knocking at the floorboards for too long just a little too loudly, I found something wicked and dear, something troubling and cathartic in the end. I don’t know if I love this album. But I love that it exists.

Earlier this year, Halsey invited her fans to write her letters, and I participated. I wrote about the importance of creation, the need for art to fill the world, the need for people to Make Things no matter how its results might yield an overearnestness, an overzealousness, a sense of Too Much Self. I know that my letter may not have even reached her hands, and I’m certain that if it did, it didn’t inspire this record. But I’m glad to know that whatever I wrote somehow synced up with what she created, somehow mirrored the same creative space that she was in. This record is the embodiment of fearless creation, of Making Things despite what it might cause your audience to feel. It is a record of baring an entire soul and generating an entire catalog of art from, about, and for yourself. No story dies with its narrator as its influence resonates in a billion shapes, a billion ripples on a horizonless pond. If impersonation is a reflection of its influencer, then we are all, truly, the great impersonators.

For Fans Of: Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish
Check Out: Arsonist