Review: Halsey — The Great Impersonator

Halsey
The Great Impersonator
Columbia Records
Street: 10.25
Halsey = Pink + Panic! At The Disco + Alanis Morissette

Alt-Pop icon Halsey (born Ashley Nicolette Frangipane) has released their fifth studio album The Great Impersonator. Described as a concept album (of which we will dive into later), the singer did 25 straight days of promotions, including dressing up as (but not limited to) Cher, David Bowie, Dolly Parton, Britney Spears and Fiona Apple. In this cosplay compilation across social media, the singer would summarize an artist of inspiration along with a track snippet. Despite their latest endeavor being quite cluttered trackwise, it manages to actually show off some of their potential in being a proper artist. Just behind a terrible concept. 

Across the internet, The Great Impersonator is already majorly divisive. Rolling Stone gave 4 out of 5 stars, NME a 5 out of 5 and The Needle Drop gave the album an abysmal 1. In reality, none of these reviews accurately describe the most glaring eyesore on the project the lack of an interesting direction to go. However, I discovered deeper within the project that some of Halsey’s best work was hidden amongst the duds.

As stated before, The Great Impersonator actually sounds not that bad—it just aesthetically doesn’t exist. In my humble opinion, it seems like the Halsey camp collected these 19 songs that do not sound cohesive next to each other at all and had to create a marketing campaign around them. The premise is that each song is inspired by a radically different musician, resulting in having to create a narrative of Halsey as a chameleon in pop-music. However, in setting herself up to imitate the greats, she doesn’t stick the landing for most.

On the topic of imitations, Halsey promised the audience a journey through all genres of pop music, ranging from the ‘70s all the way to present day. Despite having watered down tone variation for a majority of the tracks that result in them feeling decade-less more than anything, we eventually find ourselves all the way from Bowie to Amy Lee of Evanescence. Eventually.

Halsey has a recurring acoustic ballad tone throughout the project; they seem more in their singer/songwriter mode than ever before as opposed to the sultry alt-pop player of the last decade or so. However, that may have just been their impression of Björk, Fiona Apple and Stevie Nicks talking. Again on the topic of her impersonations, maybe that’s what disappointed me the most with this concept. I wish Halsey would dive deep into creating songs that sound like Halsey and not just a bad Bruce Springsteen song for the sake of making it. Some of the best tracks on the album include “Darwinism,” which has the singer channel their inner Lana Del Rey and “Hurt Feelings,” which instrumentally might be one of the most experimental tracks Halsey has ever made, think Imogen Heap (ironically, Halsey would say her inspiration for this track was Herself, from the 2015 release Badlands.) I would much rather Halsey stick with a cohesive vision while using influences instead of throwing Hail Marys into every subgenre she’s interested in. Another highlight of the album was the track “Arsonist,” which in my opinion sounds much more like Billie Eillish than the original claim of Fiona Apple. 

The Great Impersonator isn’t as downright abrasive or immature as Halsey’s previous projects, but also doesn’t reach the creative and artistic niche as her last album, the Trent Reznor–produced If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, did. The Great Impersonator delivers some of Halsey’s best work, if only delivered in a cluttered and bloated tracklist with a lack of cohesive sound. –Jake Fabbri

Read more national reviews here: 
Review: Action Bronson – JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACHLAVA THE DOCTOR
Review: Chat Pile – Cool World