There are a couple of months still left in the year, but it feels safe to say right now that, as an album that bites off every bit as much as it can chew, and maybe a little more, Halsey‘s “The Great Impersonator” is 2024’s most unabashedly ambitious record by a major pop artist. It’s also the saddest, by about a country mile. One of the year’s best? Yes, that too.
It’s a four-hanky album, and really, the only thing preventing “The Great Impersonator” from becoming a full-on five-hankerchief effort is a recurring playfulness in just how sprawling, messy and multi-faceted the record is, not to mention how determined it is to display Halsey’s influences on its sleeve. There are musical surprises and delights that help mitigate the emotionally rough stuff. But who is anybody kidding — if you’ve got a whole box of Kleenex, bring it. And if you stand anywhere at all on the Highly Sensitive Person scale, you will get triggered as Halsey takes on abandonment issues, self-contempt, mental illness, physical illness, family dysfunction, mortality and other light fare. Artfully, thankfully.
Describing “The Great Impersonator” in a nutshell is tough because it is basically two concept albums in one — with the two concepts almost being at war with each other, but not quite. Whether she came up with these twin visions for the album simultaneously or sequentially is hard to know. Some of the material is so raw in its confessional power that you might harbor the suspicion may arise that Halsey, after having penned some of the harshest and most revealing songs of her career, decided to come up with a different kind of musical overlay for the album to give it more of a “fun” side to go with the heartbreaking one. It all ends up being rather dense, between all the different things the artist is inviting you to think about at once, so the really attentive fan may want to bring some CliffsNotes along with the Kleenex. But “Impersonator” rewards any extra effort put in, even if it’s not designed to be anybody’s idea of an easy listen.
The core concept of the record, at its heart, is sheer anxiety. The singer’s pile-ups and pile-ons of bad news over the last few years are the sort that would throw anybody for a loop, never mind make for unbelievable songwriting grist. Foremost among them: splitting up with a partner — not terribly amicably, it seems — soon after the birth of her first child, and going into the hospital for treatment after getting the twin diagnoses of lupus and leukemia. These subjects are more than enough to make up a walloping 18-song album.
So what does Halsey do but then arrive at an entirely different way of making and encouraging fans to think about the album, one in which each song represents the influence of 18 star or superstar artists from decades past. (Well, 17, actually — she counts 2015-era “Badlands Halsey” as the major influence on herself on one track.) If you’re on socials or pay attention much to pop culture, you’ve probably already seen the campaign in which Halsey previewed one by one all the heroes she is saluting in some way with these songs, posting photos in which she has elaborately recreated exact iconic looks of Cher, Kate Bush, Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton, Amy Lee, PJ Harvey, Stevie Nicks, Bruce Springsteen, Dolores O’Riordan, Aaliyah, Tori Amos, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie and Bjork. And Britney Spears, of course, who is actually interpolated in “Lucky,” the video for which caused the tributee a little headline-stirring consternation when it first came out to tease the album in July. (After a little explaining, Britney got over it.) This all adds up to one very elaborate lark… but it’s a testament to how good the underlying material is that this gambit doesn’t distract too much from the powerful stuff that Halsey is wrestling with throughout the record. Or, if it does, that the momentary distraction is a little bit welcome, before Halsey returns you to your regularly scheduled trauma.
Are the stated (and pictured) influences apparent in the finished tracks? Sometimes overtly, yes, but usually pretty subtly, and in a few cases it’s hard to make the connection at all. Seeing her pose as Dolly in the promo for “Hometown,” it’s not hard to guess that this will be the album’s country-flavored track, though its evocation of how a dead high-school classmate is frozen in time doesn’t really sound like something Parton would have written. On the other hand, the song earmarked as nicking from Stevie Nicks, “Panic Attack,” is utterly “Dreams”-like in its distinctly ’70s-analog execution. “Letter to God (1983)” lives up to its Springsteen-ian promise with some “I’m on Fire”-style synths and balladic rim-shot rhythms. If you’re going to promise a PJ Harvey-styled track, you better deliver some rough drama, and “Dog Years” does, beautifully. But then, someone will have to explain to most of us how “I Believe in You” connects to Ronstadt, or “Letter to God (1974)” to Cher. They’re terrific tracks in their own right, so there’s no real need to sweat it. Conversely, the title track that closes the album really is Bjork-like, with its upturned vocal trills and harp/orchestral sounds. It’s such an homage that it nearly counts as a semi-comic grace note to finish the record … and you probably won’t mind if there’s a bit of relative levity, after the severity of what’s come before.
But if you don’t want to pay attention to all this riffing on Halsey’s mostly (but not entirely) female role models, you won’t miss much when it comes to the real grist of the album, and might actually be at an advantage in terms of staying attuned to what the songs are really about… which is not Evanescence or the Thin White Duke at all.
The loose thread that connects these two concepts of the record is Halsey possibly being driven to a lifelong personality crisis — and a struggle to find a single, true, unrefracted image of herself — by the demons of an unhappy family upbringing, mental health struggles, and a lot of shit that followed. So “The Great Impersonator” isn’t altogether bifurcated in its ambitions. But what you will remember after you’ve forgotten the interesting parade of homages is the brutal honesty of these songs, rendered in often honestly poetic verses that reaffirm Halsey as one of the best pop writers of her ilk and her era.
The closest analog this year for the kind of autobiographically precise, emotionally pungent lyric-writing the artist is doing here would be Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department.” But Swift wasn’t dealing with literal disease on top of diseased relationships, so Halsey has got a few extra building blocks here.
References to the singer’s now finally well-known battles with lupus and leukemia abound mostly in the first part of the album (and turn up again in the late inning where “Lucky” is almost anticlimactically placed). Ironically, the tune that deals most lengthily and outrightly with Halsey’s illness, “The End,” is also the closest thing to a cheerful song in the collection. That’s because it’s the one time on the album she’s speaking to a supportive and apparently loving significant other, as opposed to living in isolation or with the seemingly regrettable baby daddy of her past. “When I met you, I thought I was damaged goods / Had a fucked up childhood / And there’s poison in my brain and in my blood / If you knew it was the end of the world, could you love me like a child?” she sings, plaintively, against some simple finger-picking that allows this to peg “The End” as her Joni song. Halsey tells her new doctor that she’s “not bitter ’cause I finally found a lover / Who’s better for my liver, and now I’ll finally recover” — while excoriating an old doc who seemingly dismissed her claims of illness. The song ends with the singer asking, “Could you pick me up at eight? ‘Cause my treatment starts today.” It’s the sweetest moment on an album that doesn’t reach for a lot of them.
It’s not as much of a leukemia album as it might seem at first, since, having established where she’s at with that in some fairly stark terms, she moves on to some more universal areas of distress. If you want to hear a song that does a brilliant job of combining loneliness with existential panic — why go for just one of those when you can get a two-fer? — proceed immediately to “Darwinism.” (This one, Halsey describes as a ’90s Bowie/Radiohead tribute.) Starting with a “there are more fish in the sea” analogy after a possible breakup, she wonders “if I’m made for land and not the sea at all / Could I crawl and find some kind Neanderthal?” But she gets stuck on the beach, in some arrested state on the way to evolution, telling her presumably happier listeners: “You all know something that I don’t / You all learned something that I fear I’ll never know / You all grew body parts I fear I’ll never know.” The sentiment is chilling, even as you get the warm rush of hearing rich songwriting that is as relatable as it is metaphorical.
“Darwinism” is one of three songs on the album I’d describe as true mic-drop moments. Another is “Lonely Is the Muse,” a slow-burning rocker that leads to a literally screaming climax, with Halsey playing the role of a woman whose role in life is to inspire a lover and then be discarded, serially.
But the song that is most likely to be immediately discussed by fans, and the album’s most soul-flattening burst of sorrow and rage, is “Life of the Spider (Draft).” The parenthetical subtitle signals that this is a spontaneous piano-and-vocal demo that Halsey didn’t dare to re-record, and the assignation of Tori Amos as the designated influence is an indication that this is “Me and a Gun”-level rough stuff (although it doesn’t describe a literal assault). Accurately described by the singer as “a “voice “the saddest song I’ve ever written in my life,” the raw tune has Halsey characterizing herself as a spider, about to be snuffed out by a perturbed ex-partner angry at having to share the space with a harmless arachnid. The album doesn’t come with any intermissions, but you might require a 20-minute break before moving on after this one.
Singling out those three doesn’t mean the album is lacking for other highly worthy tracks. Among them: “I Believe in Magic” (which has a “Papa don’t preach” reference, but does not list Madonna as inspiration) deals with feelings about Halsey’s parents and her son and the ticking clocks as both age up — a lot less sentimentally than the title would indicate. “My mama’s getting old / Well, it’s contagious and you’ll catch it like a cold,” she sings. “She won’t admit it, but it’s something that I know / ‘Cause every year that passes for me passes her a hundredfold.” This may not exactly precipitate some tender moment where Halsey will bring her family out on stage for a bow, but the sheer honesty of the feelings about aging and mortality being expressed here is bracing — and palatable for being so tenderly expressed.
This isn’t an album full of “groove” songs, but they do occur, amid all the more traditional singer/songwriter or rock stylings, most notably with “Arsonist,” a song whose music goes down much more smoothly than its tormented words. Following the birth of her child and subsequent split, the singer asks, pointedly, “Did you know the father’s DNA stays inside the mother for seven years? Have you ever waited seven years?” We might need Bill Nye to come in and assess the science there, but anyone who has a heart may relate to Halsey’s belief that “somebody will love me for the way that I’m designed / Devastation, creation, intertwined.”
Michael Uzowuru was Halsey’s collaborator on that track, and most of the album’s numbers feature him, Alex G, Caleb Laven and/or Sean Matsukawa, working individually or in combination for the first time since they teamed up for an album since Frank Ocean’s “Endless” and “Blonde.” The producers of Halsey’s last album, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, are a hard act to follow — there was a real sonic breakthrough for her on that record, “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power.” But these four newly enlisted producers or engineers, and the others who join them (including Greg Kurstin, Dylan Wiggins, Austin & Wyatt, Emile Haynie and Tyler Johnson) have managed to create a new record that maintains some of the winning spookiness of the Reznor/Ross effort while opening up to a wider palette. As you’d hope, with an epic 18 tracks to get through.
Recommending “The Great Impersonator” should come with some asterisks, since it definitely won’t be for everybody, and maybe not even every Halsey fan. But it’s for those who like their music confessional and their emotional journeys rough, and who don’t mind a mixture of elegant passages and pure expurgation of difficult thoughts. As for Halsey throwing in a whole kitchen sink’s worth of pop-history homages, to boot? That’s a little like having an album-length bonus track running through the whole thing. Really, it’s all too much — and, because she’s so on fire and in-the-moment, so great at all this right now, it’s just enough.
