“The Great Imitator” is Halsey’s most intense music ever

Halsey has been so many different people over the last decade. The youthful pop rebel who spoke of “New Americana” for a generation. The Shakespeare conceptual artist who transformed Romeo and Juliet Hopeless Fountain Kingdom. The world's best author of Manic. The industrial hate machine that blows up the aggression generated by Nine Inch Nails If I can't have love, I want power. But The great imitator is her rawest and darkest incarnation yet. When Halsey turns 30, she finds herself alone and admits that she has no idea who she is anymore. As she sings in the opener, “The Only Living Girl in LA,” “I wake up every day wishing I was different. I look around and it’s just me.”

The great imitator is the darkest music Halsey has ever made, and that's saying something. The songs are full of anger and depression as she unpacks her autobiography. In recent years, she has spoken openly about her terrible health problems, including lupus and her T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder. She has experienced a motherhood that seems to have been completely traumatizing. She fantasizes about death in practically every track. She can't even trust her friends and admits, “I wonder who really loves me here or who wants a job.”

These songs continually return to her love-hate relationship and obsession with fame after working so hard to become famous at an age when she was just beginning to understand herself. Halsey has divided 2024 between her comeback and publicly wishing she would never come back at all. As she explains, “My special talent is not writing/It's not singing/It's feeling everything that every living person feels every day.” But that's what gives the album, for all its convoluted confusion of identity, an atmosphere of gives compassion. A great impersonator? Isn't that everyone?

The great imitator has her most stripped down music, often just guitar and piano. She works with the team that previously worked with Frank Ocean Endless And Blondincluding Michael Uzohuru, Caleb Laven and indie rock troubadour Alex G. There's a theme of time travel as Halsey travels through pop history, imagining herself as a character in each era. Her rollout was a work of art in itself – Halsey teased the album by releasing a photo each day featuring her starring as a different pop icon. There's one for every song on the album, from Dolly Parton, Kate Bush, Cher and David Bowie to Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, PJ Harvey and Aaliyah.

She brings this time travel concept into the tunes as she imagines herself in the 1970s, with the Fleetwood Mac-style soft rock of “Panic Attack” or the old-school Nashville twang of “Hometown.” It moves into the '90s with the grunge kick of “Ego” and “Lonely Is The Muse” and then moves into the 2000s TRL-Teen pop style with the Britney tribute “Lucky,” which incorporates the chorus from the Kenwood Queen hit of the same name. She moves into the eighties with the great Springsteen tribute “Letter To God (1983)”. The album also includes “Letter to God” songs from 1974 and 1998, with a different crisis for each decade. “Darwinism” isn’t the first time she’s attempted a Bowie homage, but it’s the broadest and best.

It's a clever conceit – Ashley Frangipane spends the album wondering who she would have become if she had become Halsey in a different time and place. So she tries out these pop eras to see how they feel. The highlight is “The Only Living Girl in LA,” where she takes Simon & Garfunkel to a 1990s warehouse rave. Halsey bares her soul on the acoustic guitar and laughs out loud at her own misery. She laments fame but also worries about not being famous anymore, quipping, “I don't know if I could sell out my own funeral.” By the end, the song disintegrates into bursts of distorted glitch-core Rush. It's like those moments on a Chemical Brothers album when Beth Orton beams in to enchant the audience with a folky chillout spell.

“This is a cry for help,” Halsey sings in the title track, the finale of an album in which she mentions her death 78 times (by a rough count) in 66 minutes. There is a constant tension between the playful wit of the music and the languid somberness of the singing. But the best moments continue The great imitator Come when the music wins. Playing around with the past seems to stimulate their imagination – and point them toward the future.