Review: Halsey takes a step backward and a look inward on new album

POP/ROCK

Halsey, ”The Great Impersonator” (Columbia)

“The Great Impersonator,” the high-concept new album from Halsey (who uses she/they pronouns), openly pays homage to her role models. On her Instagram, she specifies an influence for each song, among them Kate Bush, David Bowie, Dolly Parton, Björk and Aaliyah. She poses in photos like each one, with wigs and costumes, somewhere between Cindy Sherman and a songwriter’s mood board. And in one song, “Lucky,” she adapts both the title and the chorus of Britney Spears’ “Lucky” to apply to her own time as a pop celebrity. “I told everybody I was fine for a whole damn year,” she sings. “And that’s the biggest lie of my career.”

“The Great Impersonator” lets Halsey, who is 30, try on vintage styles, largely acoustic and hand-played. It’s a sharp turn away from the fearsome, exploratory studio arsenal of “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power,” her 2021 album that was produced by Nine Inch Nails. The explicit concept makes a pre-emptive strike against accusations of derivativeness. Yet even as the album underlines what Halsey has learned from others, it shows what sets her apart: her insistence on channeling intense pain through her songs. In “Only Living Girl in LA,” which opens the new album, Halsey sings, “I wake up every day in some new kind of suffering / I’ve never known a day of peace.”

From the beginning — her first EP, “Room 93,” was released in 2014 — Halsey has sung about fierce inner conflicts. On her 2015 album, “Badlands,” she sang, in “Gasoline,” “Do you tear yourself apart to entertain like me?” Her songs juggle traumas, insecurities, obsessions, self-destructive impulses, the imperatives of stardom and the inevitability of death.

Songs on “The Great Impersonator” reflect Halsey’s more recent life changes: the birth in 2021 of her son, Ender Ridley Aydin — whose voice appears in a few songs — and her serious health problems. In June, Halsey revealed that she has been under treatment for chronic autoimmune conditions: lupus erythematosus and T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder. And in September, she stated, “I made this record in the space between life and death.”

Halsey’s “The Great Impersonator” is full of medical encounters, recognizing the fragility and centrality of the body. “The End” — a Joni Mitchell tribute set to fingerpicked acoustic guitar and high vocal harmonies — sets doctor visits against the solace of love. “I Never Loved You,” with stately piano chords à la Kate Bush, envisions futile surgery after a lovers’ quarrel and a car crash. In “Letter to God (1983),” which hints at the ticking beat and sustained keyboard lines of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire,” Halsey recalls an addicted boyfriend who had “track marks on his arms,” then notes, “Now I’m the one with needles in my arms and in my legs / I’m making jokes about the blood tests and I’m planning my estate.”

Halsey and her many co-producers — including Michael Uzowuru, Alex G, Greg Kurstin and Emile Haynie — gesture clearly toward her avowed favorites. There are burgeoning crescendos in “Ego” and in “Lonely Is the Muse,” Halsey’s nods to Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries and Amy Lee of Evanescence. “Arsonist” and “Dog Years” reflect the sullen stubbornness of Fiona Apple and PJ Harvey. “Panic Attack” harks back to the Stevie Nicks of “Rhiannon” as Halsey considers whether a romance is “a danger to my health.”

For Halsey, “The Great Impersonator” is a step backward and a look inward. The borrowed styles are musical safe spaces or perhaps recovery rooms, known environments where she can take time to recuperate. Many of the songs acknowledge, if only tentatively, that love might have healing powers. In the meantime, the music that shaped her can still be a sanctuary.

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