Halsey's The Great Impersonator' Review
has been so many different people over the past decade. The teenage pop rebel who spoke for a generation of “New Americana.” The Shakespearean conceptual artist who turned Romeo and Juliet intoThe Great Impersonator
is her rawest, darkest incarnation yet. Halsey stands alone as she turns 30, confessing that she has no idea who she is anymore. As she sings in the opener, “The Only Living Girl in L.A.,” “I wake up every day and wish that I was different/I look around and it’s just me.”is the bleakest music Halsey has ever made, and that’s saying something. The songs are loaded with rage and depression, as she unpacks her autobiography.
These songs keep returning to her love/hate obsession with stardom, after working so hard to get famous at an age when she was barely beginning to figure herself out. Halsey has split 2024 between making her comeback and publicly wishing she’d never come back at all. As she declares, “My special talent isn’t writing/It’s not singing/It’s feeling everything that everyone alive feels every day.” But that’s what gives the album a spirit of commiseration, with all its mixed-up identity confusion.
It’s a clever conceit — Ashley Frangipane spends the album wondering who she might have turned into, if she’d become Halsey in a different time and place. So she tries on these pop eras to see how they feel. The highlight is “The Only Living Girl in L.A.,” where she takes Simon & Garfunkel to a 1990s warehouse rave. Halsey bares her soul over acoustic guitar, laughing out loud at her own misery.
“This is a cry for help,” Halsey sings in the title song, the finale to an album where she mentions her death 78 times in 66 minutes. There’s a constant tension between the playful wit in the music and the sluggish gloom of the vocals. But the best moments oncome when the music wins out. Playing around with the past seems to shake up her imagination — and point her toward the future.
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