By Lake DiStefano
Arts & Entertainment Editor
Halsey has always been a confusing artist to me. With her 2015 debut “Badlands,” she captured my attention by creating pop music with overt themes of mental health. However, as her career progressed, she seemed to accidentally fall into making unaffecting pop hits like “Closer” and “Without Me.”
Thankfully, “The Great Impersonator” is a return to form for the singer, as she adorns a multitude of musical styles across this 18-track behemoth of a record.
Lyrically speaking, this album covers a ton of ground, and somewhat follows a narrative — albeit one that is far from chronological. Halsey meditates on generational trauma and mortality as she comes to grips with her chronic illness and newfound motherhood.
She announced via an Instagram post made earlier this year that she had been diagnosed with Lupus, as well as a rare T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder, and this diagnosis informs most of the lyrical content on the record.
This record is almost uncomfortable to listen to at times, as she reckons with the reality of her chronic illness. Her diagnosis looms over every song like a shadow, as she makes many allusions to not expecting to live much longer.
The different “Letters to God” tracks — one for 1974, 1983 and 1998 — act as a structure for the narrative. They’re not really songs, and are instead more akin to a spoken-word poem performed to an instrumental.
My favorite of these is 1974, as Halsey recounts how she used to pray to get sick because a boy in her class started getting treated better by his parents after he got leukemia. She wants her parents to stop fighting, and this young narrator foolishly believes getting sick will do that for her.
Listening to this track, while not necessarily a song in the traditional sense, really moved me. The reality of her current illness makes this song almost hard to stomach.
She doesn’t drop this thread though. She continues to interrogate what being sick means for her in “The End” and “Panic Attack” — the latter of which is a glistening Stevie Nicks-inspired track that is easily my favorite on the whole album.
In “I Believe in Magic” and “Hurt Feelings,” Halsey begins to reflect on how her parents have affected the way she parents her own son. While the former isn’t incredibly melodically interesting, the latter is a very addicting lo-fi sound I find myself returning to often.
Despite the many successful experiments on the record, unfortunately, the sheer length of it makes it inevitable some will not fully land or work.
The album opener, “Only Living Girl in LA,” is a six-minute waste of time, as all the interesting points of the song, both musically and lyrically, only last for about a minute toward the very end. It felt very overwrought for seemingly no good reason.
Another miss on the record is “Lucky,” which features a hook interpolated from the Britney Spears song of the same name. It’s a bit too poppy for this album’s tone and doesn’t offer anything new lyrically either.
Despite these duds, the rest of the tracklist is incredibly strong, with the really strange sounds seen on “Dog Years” and “Arsonist” being some of the most compelling work here.
Halsey has really found her stride with this project, and I am pleasantly surprised with how well written the record is. There are multiple moments in almost every song where I felt a true depth within her lyricism, on top of the already rich soundscapes she’s playing with.
The nuance with which she details her emotions regarding her illness is really astounding, and her unflinching portrayal of the sheer horror of your body giving up on you really resonated with me.
I can only hope that she continues to approach her future work with this level of fearlessness and with a lack of concern for producing work that needs to fit some pop formula.
