Halsey’s Manic is a Grand, Confounding Image of a Newly-Minted Star
The undefinable pop star aims to paint a clearer image of herself by putting her loves and ambitions on full display

Ashley Frangipane, better known as Halsey, has made it a point to defy labels in her rise to pop’s upper echelons. It’s a tricky thing to negotiate that genre fluidity with the pop machine’s penchant for framework—and, at times, it feels like she’s shed and rebuilt three different pop star personas since emerging on the national stage with her 2015 debut, Badlands.
She disavowed the “tri-bi” label (bisexual, biracial, bipolar) that was thrust upon her as an upstart darling at SXSW, the mid-decade comparisons to the wave of alternative pop made by women and that certain DJ duo that may have overshadowed her solo success by climbing to number one on the Billboard charts with her. But being slippery doesn’t a superstar make, a classification that ostensibly applies to her after the past couple of years—after nabbing her first Top 10s, then her first number one single (“Without Me,” which appears here in a beguiling new light), appearing in A Star Is Born and doing double-duty on SNL.
Manic is a rich and often confounding listen, an expansive album filled to the brim with the imagined worlds Halsey’s built for herself in the real one. It’s also sincerely, indefatigably Halsey: She puts her loves and ambitions on wholly earnest display, even if it doesn’t always make for the most consistent listen.
Stardom is inescapable, but Halsey’s fashioned herself a beguiling escape hatch—refracting herself through sampled movie clips, three interludes featuring three separate guests and genre exercises in country, ’90s alt-rock and twilit electropop. Throughout, she plays with autobiography, amplifying and subduing her reality by inviting other voices in the fold.
“Is it really that strange if I always wanna change?” she asks herself on “Ashley,” Manic’s opening cut. She told Rolling Stone that she wrote Manic in an extended period of mania, each song written on the basis of “whatever the fuck I felt like making.” As such, its list of collaborators is exhaustive, with studio stalwarts (Greg Kurstin, Benny Blanco, Cashmere Cat) offset with rising producers like XXXTentacion collaborator John Cunningham and Finneas O’Connell. Halsey even invites an unusual trio of artists—Dominic Fike, BTS’ Suga and Alanis Morissette in top form—for brief interludes, a display of both her eclectic taste and the inevitable genre collisions that occur throughout Manic. Morissette fares best here, a queer fantasia that filters the angst of “All The Things She Said” and pummels that song’s artificial longing into visceral, unrepentant desire.