Ever since the synth-pop lightning of “Hurricane” first touched down in 2014, Halsey has been more of an architect than a starlet. Sure, the New Jersey-born songwriter has cranked out their share of Top 40 earworms: the chagrined clapback “Without Me”; bright confessional “Bad At Love”; or teeth-baring declaration of self, “Nightmare.” But those songs convey only a sliver of their respective album rollouts, each hook a pillar upholding the staggering scope of Halsey’s ambitious concepts: “Bad At Love” placed within the charged Shakespearean environment of hopeless fountain kingdom, or most recently, “Nightmare” extending If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, a commentary on pregnancy and parenthood that jerks with the push and pull of the Madonna-whore complex.
Yet on her fifth album, The Great Impersonator, Halsey finds herself for the first time working with a limited bandwidth that’s determined by the whims of her body. Earlier this year, the artist shared that was diagnosed with Lupus SLE and a rare T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder in 2022. Both conditions are now “being managed or in remission,” she says—a blessing, but not a guarantee when she penned The Great Impersonator, which she imagined would be her last album. “I wrote each word with the confident terror of a person who might not see tomorrow. Nothing mattered and somehow everything did,” she wrote on X last week.
Often downtrodden but always sparkling with wit, The Great Impersonator is a morbidly earnest self-sendoff, written while staring down a quickly narrowing future. While resisting to buckle under dire circumstances, The Great Impersonator tackles Halsey’s greatest concept yet: if she were born into a different generation, would her life’s trajectory play out the same way? Would the scrappy songwriter Ashley Frangipane become Halsey—and would Halsey, in turn, become ill?
Here she poses as the titular impersonator, using icons of decades past—like Dolly Parton, PJ Harvey, and Aaliyah—as the sonic framework for her own story. And on an album proclaiming that she can be anything, Halsey refuses to languish as a hitmaking commodity in her (possible) final days, abandoning earworms for diary-like lyricism that comprises her most aching work to date.
“I don’t know if I could sell out my own funeral / At least not at this point in time,” they sing on the six-minute opener “Only Living Girl In LA,” a litmus test for whether or not listeners will enjoy the hour-long journey ahead. In an ironic twist, the foundation of The Great Impersonator presents an inverse of their debut LP Badlands; where their 2015 record used minimal guitars to evoke a dismal, dystopian atmosphere, here they heavily lean on acoustic and miry riffs to reckon with the potential end of their own world. As they leap between vastly different eras of inspiration, the stripped-back tone often feels repetitive, particularly on an 18-track record. Instead, The Great Impersonator largely shines on Halsey’s bigger swings.
“Lonely is the Muse,” for instance, stews in a pool of aggravated grunge, with Halsey muttering about their flexibility: “I can always reassemble to fit perfectly for you / Or anybody that decides that I’m of use.” The brooding atmosphere carries over to “Dog Years,” which drops the artist on all fours, imploring to be “put down” while musing “They say all dogs go to heaven / well, what about a bitch?” “Life of the Spider (Draft)” morphs them again, as they roar about feeling like a burden in spite of their spindly, fragile state.
Elsewhere, Halsey funnels existentialism into songs with more spring; “Ego” spins a troubled headspace into rallying pop-punk, and “Panic Attack” rides a “Dreams”-esque bass riff while juggling a racing heart and distressed body. “Lucky,” a gentle reworking of the Britney Spears song of the same name, is the album’s most blatant—but least compelling—act of mimicry, especially in contrast to more effective hat tips to Bruce Springsteen (“Letter to God (1983)”) and Fiona Apple (“Arsonist”).
The Great Impersonator is not a declaration of doom, but Halsey’s surrender to whatever lies ahead, flooded with relief that all of her truths are on the table. But on the title track, she can’t help reveling in her acting abilities once more, labeling herself “some little Frankenstein” while tiptoeing through the album’s airy, Björk-influenced finale. “Does a story die with its narrator? / Surely it’s forgotten sooner or later,” she chirps on the chorus. You can hear an impish smile on her lips, like an actor ending a play with a riddle. Impersonator or not, winking moments like these prove Halsey is an entertainer until the end.
Victoria Wasylak is an award-winning music journalist, a music columnist for The Boston Globe, and the Boston music editor of Vanyaland. Her work has appeared in Paste, NYLON, GRAMMY.com, WBUR, and Under The Radar, and she’s written over a dozen episodes of the world-renowned music and true crime podcast, Disgraceland. Last year she appeared in Forbes’ inaugural 30 Under 30 list for Boston.
