The Great Impersonator

For their fifth album, The Great Impersonator, Halsey decided to make a set of songs inspired by different pop icons from the 1970s onwards. The idea has real emotional grounding—the album was written during a period in which they dealt with postpartum depression, lupus, and T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder, leaving them feeling distanced from their own body and “like a professional Halsey impersonator”—but Halsey has gone whole hog with the affair, teasing the record with a steady drip of photoshoots that meticulously recreate famous shots of Joni Mitchell, Fiona Apple, Stevie Nicks, and more.

Credit where credit’s due: This is a great idea for a series of Instagram posts. As the concept for a pop album, it’s fairly boilerplate—without being so explicit, this is essentially what Taylor Swift did on Lover or Chappell Roan on The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. The force with which Halsey has embraced this aspect of The Great Impersonator is, altogether, detrimental: Knowing that the title track is a Björk tribute or that “Arsonist” is in the style of Fiona Apple makes you wonder if they’ve ever heard either artist, a doubt that arises again and again. But Halsey is addicted to concepts—all five of her records have some kind of overarching theme or conceit, the least elaborate being the one about pop in a dystopian wasteland and the most elaborate (and, if you ask me, most successful) being the one where Alanis Morissette and Suga from BTS represent characters in her psyche.

This points to a fundamental problem with the idea of Halsey as auteur: Although they’re a great curator, a brilliant singles artist—ask to hear my “the six best Halsey songs” playlist—and a hugely compelling performer, they’ve never presented a coherent vision of who they are or what they want to say in even the broadest sense. At her best, Halsey grinds nostalgia and modernity into a homogenous pulp, singing about “that Blink-182 song that we beat to death in Tucson” on an EDM track, or using Trent Reznor’s masc industrial sleaze as the backing for a record about feminine alienation. At other times, she writes about pain, adopting a martyr’s pose, but because that martyrdom is self-ascribed, it also feels profoundly unrelatable. Perhaps Halsey feels like they’re a dumping ground for the emotions of their millions of fans, a site of projection for the wounded and the lonely—but as a pop star, that’s the first bullet point in the job description.

This kind of skewed self-perception is interesting, but Halsey is not necessarily deft enough in singer-songwriter mode to pull off a nuanced exploration of it. (Their best songs—“Without Me,” “You should be sad,” “Nightmare”—are ultra-efficient and bulldozer-subtle, big emotions resulting in big payoffs.) On “Lonely Is the Muse,” they sing about being “lonely and forgotten” as the muse for past artist boyfriends; the verse is sharp and witty, and it’s also one of the most head-spinning passages in pop this year:

I’ve inspired platinum records
I’ve earned platinum airline status
And I mined a couple diamonds
From the stories in my head
But I’m reduced to just a body
Here in someone else’s bed

The muse’s role in art, historically, has been one of diminishment and objectification, but you’d be hard-pressed to suggest Halsey is some kind of Dora Maar—Halsey is one of the most successful artists of their generation, and many of their biggest hits, like the absolutely brutal Hot 100 No. 1 “Without Me,” carry out character assassinations of former romantic partners with the precision of an MI6 agent. There is absolutely no convincing argument to be made that G-Eazy’s songs about Halsey are taken more seriously than Halsey’s about G-Eazy, so you have to wonder about the purpose and value of this song; is it to conjure a sense of victimhood? To make some listeners feel bad for not exalting her genius? There’s no accounting for how someone feels, obviously, but as a listener, it’s jarring to hear a passage like this, whose indulgently sad veneer hides a convenient rejection of its author’s own agency and talent. Does Halsey see absolutely no irony in claiming she bears the weight of millions of fans’ expectations before, 40-odd minutes later, reducing her own output to “a couple diamonds”?

It’s hard to say, truthfully, but much of The Great Impersonator does feel like it’s designed to position Halsey as a tortured, singular artist: Their status as a loner weirdo is invoked on “Darwinism,” a David Bowie tribute that sounds like Radiohead, and the PJ Harvey–inspired cut “Dog Years,” itself one of the album’s better approximations. (It also contains a true clunker of a sickness pun: “I’m trying to B positive but O it’s really hard.”) A nicely designed publicity website for the album proudly notes that The Great Impersonator is the first time producers Michael Uzowuru and Alex G, vocal producer Caleb Laven, and engineer Sean Matsukawa “have worked together on a project since Frank Ocean’s Endless and Blonde”—a somewhat useless detail that only really tells you that Halsey is hoping you’ll hear this as a Great Album. In reality, it’s one big attempt at trompe l’oeil, its studio sounds and mumbles of between-take chatter carefully placed to make you feel like you’re seeing greatness conjured before your eyes. An Alex G fan would only recognize his presence here because you can literally hear him talking in a couple of songs; aside from that, the anonymous, polyester takes on soft-rock and raw folk bear no similarity to his own music. The main musical discovery here might be that even the guys from Blonde can churn out When We Were Young replacement band–worthy pop-punk if they really try.

All this pomp and pap is unfortunate, because the moments on the album where Halsey zeroes in on the concrete realities of her life, as opposed to her own ideas of how others perceive her, are some of her most interesting songs in a long while. “The End,” a Joni Mitchell tribute that sounds like Phoebe Bridgers, is a fascinatingly conceived fantasy, a folk song on which they sing with moony reverence about the apocalypse as a way of avoiding thinking about leukemia treatment; three interludes titled “Letter to God” work as waypoints throughout the record, each a vignette of a time in which Halsey turned to prayer in order to appeal for escape from her circumstances. Although these songs rarely sound like the artists Halsey has said she’s referencing, they’re also the most successful manifestations of The Great Impersonator’s concept: thought experiments wondering how different songwriters might respond to a predicament as dire and exceptional as Halsey’s.

Perhaps that’s a fallacy, though: The Great Impersonator is, after all, an album about how Halsey responded to Halsey’s predicament, and for the most part it trades in watery meditations on fame and torturous extended metaphors. Its most damning quality might be that, at the bottom of it all, it’s still hard to focus your eyes on who Halsey is: They’re not great at channeling artists from eras gone by, nor are they a particularly sharp assessor of modern celebrity. So what then? Is it enough, as The Great Impersonator so clearly wants us to believe it is, to say you’ve suffered for your art, and your fans, and call it a day?

Halsey: The Great Impersonator

$30 at Rough Trade

$30 at Amazon

$30 $28 at Target