‘The Great Impersonator’ is Halsey’s Rawest, Darkest Incarnation Yet
Halsey has been so many different people over the past decade. The teenage pop rebel who spoke for a generation of “New Americana.” The Shakespearean conceptual artist who turned Romeo and Juliet into Hopeless Fountain Kingdom. The world-beating auteur of Manic. The industrial hate machine blasting Nine Inch Nails-produced aggression on If I Can’t Have Love I Want Power. But The Great Impersonator is her rawest, darkest incarnation yet. Halsey stands alone as she turns 30, confessing that she has no idea who she is anymore. As she sings in the opener, “The Only Living Girl in L.A.,” “I wake up every day and wish that I was different/I look around and it’s just me.”
The Great Impersonator is the bleakest music Halsey has ever made, and that’s saying something. The songs are loaded with rage and depression, as she unpacks her autobiography. In recent years, she’s been open about her terrifying health troubles, including lupus and her T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder. She’s experienced motherhood, which seems to have been totally traumatizing. She fantasizes about death in virtually every track. She can’t even trust her friends, admitting, “I wonder who here really loves me, or who wants to be employed.”
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These songs keep returning to her love/hate obsession with stardom, after working so hard to get famous at an age when she was barely beginning to figure herself out. Halsey has split 2024 between making her comeback and publicly wishing she’d never come back at all. As she declares, “My special talent isn’t writing/It’s not singing/It’s feeling everything that everyone alive feels every day.” But that’s what gives the album a spirit of commiseration, with all its mixed-up identity confusion. A great impersonator? Isn’t everyone?
The Great Impersonator has her most stripped-down music, often just guitar and piano. She works with the team that collaborated with Frank Ocean on Endless and Blonde, including Michael Uzohuru, Caleb Laven, and indie-rock troubadour Alex G. There’s a theme of time travel, as Halsey runs through pop history and imagines herself as a character in every era. Her rollout has been a work of art in itself — Halsey has been teasing the album by posting a photo every day, cosplaying as a different pop icon. There’s one for each song on the album, from Dolly Parton, Kate Bush, Cher, and David Bowie to Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, PJ Harvey, and Aaliyah.
She brings that time-travel concept to the tunes, as when she imagines herself in the 1970s, with the Fleetwood Mac-style soft-rock of “Panic Attack,” or the old-school Nashville twang of “Hometown.” She goes Nineties with the grunge kick of “Ego” and “Lonely Is The Muse,” then swerves into 2000s TRL-style teen-pop with the Britney homage “Lucky,” which interpolates the chorus from the Kenwood Queen’s hit of the same name. She goes Eighties with the superb Springsteen homage of “Letter To God (1983).” The album also has “Letter to God” songs dated 1974 and 1998, with a different crisis for each decade. “Darwinism” isn’t the first time she’s tried a Bowie tribute, but it’s the spaciest and best.
It’s a clever conceit — Ashley Frangipane spends the album wondering who she might have turned into, if she’d become Halsey in a different time and place. So she tries on these pop eras to see how they feel. The highlight is “The Only Living Girl in L.A.,” where she takes Simon & Garfunkel to a 1990s warehouse rave. Halsey bares her soul over acoustic guitar, laughing out loud at her own misery. She complains about fame, but also worries about not being famous any more, quipping, “I don’t know if I could sell out my own funeral.” At the end, the song flips out into bursts of distorted glitch-core noise. It’s like the moments on a Chemical Brothers album when Beth Orton would beam in to cast a folkie chill-out spell on the crowd.
“This is a cry for help,” Halsey sings in the title song, the finale to an album where she mentions her death 78 times (by a rough count) in 66 minutes. There’s a constant tension between the playful wit in the music and the sluggish gloom of the vocals. But the best moments on The Great Impersonator come when the music wins out. Playing around with the past seems to shake up her imagination — and point her toward the future.
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