It takes great skill to gracefully walk a tightrope between honesty and oversharing. Halsey’s new album The Great Impersonator is a high-concept project that, despite its ambition, never finds this balance. With aspirations of capturing emotional diversity, the album trips over its attempts at grandiosity, succumbing to overproduction, sporadic callbacks, and a referentiality that feels more self-indulging than revelatory.
Leading up to the release, the album’s rollout was genuinely clever. Where most of her peers would have wiped their Instagram feed and called it a day, Halsey posted a series of brilliantly executed impersonations – David Bowie, Amy Lee, Bruce Springsteen, Fiona Apple – that gave rise to a meme template and introduced her music to wider audiences. But while the promo has likely inspired marketing professionals, the final product ultimately fails to deliver the nuanced exploration of identity through the eras of music it promised. If anything, most songs feel frozen in a time capsule of 2000s pop-rock. The issue isn’t that Halsey references the past –artists have successfully built albums and best-selling tours around nostalgic sounds and eras gone by – but rather that she vaguely points to these influences without adding much to the conversation. The Great Impersonator feels like an actor stuck in rehearsals, never quite landing the part.
The opener, “Only Living Girl in LA,” tries to convey the devastating isolation of a serious illness. While it could have been a valuable reflection of an experience that chronically ill and disabled people have been talking about for decades, Halsey wants you to know that she is very special: “My special talent isn’t writing, it’s not singing / It’s feeling everything that everyone alive feels every day.” It’s a sentiment that might have resonated had it been supported musically more than a handful of times throughout Halsey’s career. The song attempts to collapse into a cathartic ending akin to some of Have a Nice Life’s best works but, instead, evokes their sound without capturing any of its emotional weight.
Then there is “Lucky”, the lead single and the album's most eyebrow-raising moment. Hyped up for over a month, it landed with the subtlety of an amateur cover. The song borrows Britney Spears’s melody and chorus, but rather than revitalising it, Halsey’s “Lucky” feels stale and uninspired, more like a karaoke than a commentary on fame’s darker edges. You’d expect a pop star of her calibre to let the song stand on its own, worthy of critique, but following “Lucky’s” underwhelming release, the singer took to Tumblr to complain about the “mean” fans, echoing these frustrations again at a recent show. Now, it’s one thing for an artist to defend their work, but when Halsey publicly called out Pitchfork’s Shaad D’Souza for giving The Great Impersonator a reasonable 4.8, it seemed less like genuine disappointment and more like an attempt to shut down any questioning of her genius. Surviving cancer did not make Halsey immune to criticism, and music doesn’t automatically become great just because it was inspired by a tragedy.
The album’s redeeming points arrive when Halsey pulls back
from chasing a concept and embraces what she’s always done best. “Lonely
is the Muse” could have been a vault track from her previous album,
an industrial collaboration with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, but
since this sound suits Halsey so well, it’s a pleasure to hear it again.
While “Panic Attack” falls flat at channelling Stevie Nicks and,
instead, sounds more like Badlands- or Manic-era
Halsey, the misstep works in her favour. “The End” shines as a
minimalistic ballad, a quiet space amid the chaos of sound effects
suffocating this album. Here, Halsey isn’t an impersonator, nor a pop
star playing dress-up—she’s just herself, raw and hurting, which makes
the album’s themes come alive. “Hurt Feelings,” a reflection on Halsey’s
younger years, pulls no punches, speaking to trauma in a way that feels
personal, while also deeply relatable. In a rather Swiftian way, Halsey
teleports you into a masterfully crafted scene. Pairing dark lyrics
with an upbeat melody, it leaves the eyes dry only in households that
have never known domestic abuse: “My dad is almost home, I can’t tell
time yet but I know / Because the air becomes electric, and my mother
cleans the stove.”
Unfortunately, most songs veer in the opposite direction.
“Dog Years” features an awkwardly sexual undertone at odds with Halsey’s
dead-serious reflections about her deceased pet. Maybe she was going
for something campy à la George Clinton’s “Atomic Dog,” but the result
is less cheeky and profoundly confusing. On “I Believe in Magic”,
“Arsonist” and three “Letters to God”, the overproduction detracts
further from the message, with gimmicky sound effects – from bird chirps
and studio chatter to reversed spoken word – cluttering up songs that
might have otherwise stood as beautiful emotive vignettes.
There’s no question that Halsey’s experiences with illness, motherhood, and trauma are profound, but The Great Impersonator
doesn’t convincingly frame these experiences in a way that invites
listeners into the conversation. It only wants us to know that she has
suffered. There is value in exploring personal experiences through art,
but Halsey lacks the self-awareness to tackle it gracefully. Like a
tone-deaf trauma dump in the middle of a function, The Great Impersonator
takes every opportunity to remind you how unique and tortured its
author is. While there are moments of genuine honesty and emotional
clarity, these are overshadowed by Halsey’s refusal to let the music
breathe.
