Hi, everyone. Ringthony Tonetano here, the Internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new Halsey record, The Great Impersonator.

Pop singer and songwriter, Halsey. From Tumblr fandom to mainstream stardom, Halsey's rise to popularity has been interesting, to say the least, because while I've never quite been a fan of her work, she always has some surprise in store, which I feel like you have to respect on some level, especially since her last record saw her flirting with industrial fusions of pop and rock with wall-to-wall production from Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails fame.

This new LP over here was essentially promised to be this multi-genre, multi-era exploration of music and emotion, really Halsey's full creative range. Now, if you are at all a music fan and you use social media, I would bet over the past couple of months, you've been inundated with numerous photos of Halsey doing various cosplay photoshoots that see her embodying a variety of different legendary influential musicians, Bowie, Bush, Apple, Lennox, Mitchell, Harvey, Springsteen, Cher, Björk, which is not even all of them, but still a lot of very amazing, ground-breaking, game-changing artist to reference in the lead-up to your new album, which, again, reminder, is titled The Great Impersonator.

Look, I'm not going to say I'm an expert on Halsey's music taste, her understanding of any of these artists, or her full capabilities as an artist. But the chances she was going to drop an album here that would have a fraction of the impact that even one of these artists had on the music industry in their lifetime was pretty slim. And honestly, I would even be hesitant to put money on the likelihood of her accurately capturing the sound and essence of one of these artists in a way that was actually flattering and complementary. And yeah, you know what? I regret to fucking inform you there's not a single goddamn second on this album that sounds like Fiona Apple, Kate Bush, or Bjork.

And for sure, I know in a reaction to this, there will be some detractors saying like, the impersonations, it's not literal. But I have had actual press materials passed to me saying things like, "Halsey channels Stevie Nicks on new performance of single 'Panic Attack'", which... she wishes. I mean, maybe the instrumental on the verses of that song sounds a little reminiscent of mid '70s Fleetwood Mac, sure, but the similarities start and stop there, especially once you hit the track's chorus, which sounds like your average cheesy 2000s folk pop ballad, which I actually think is more representative of the overall artistic vibe of the songs on this album, because, again, you will be sadly disappointed if you go into this thing expecting a celebration of the greats or even ripples of their influence.

I mean, sure, there are a few spots on this record that have slight country or Americana vibes. Of course, there is that Britney Spears interpolation on the song "Lucky", which was a single. And there's some Evanescence influence going on on the very edgy alt rocker, "Lonely is the Muse", which handily has some of the most excruciating lyrics on the entire record. But outside of that, for the most part, I'm just not really hearing these reference points, even when Halsey is doing her best to point directly at them.

Because if you're unaware, many of these photos that you are seeing where you're getting these impersonations, they were released alongside snippets of the songs they allegedly inspired, like on "Letter to God 1983", which, oddly enough, is the second of three versions of this same song in the goddamn tracklist. Yeah, to finish this album off, you have to hear the same mid ballad three times. And this version, apparently, is supposed to be Springsteen. But what is Springsteen about the way this sounds? The airy synthesizers, faint rock drum beat, and crowd noise in the background, which doesn't sound like Springsteen. What it sounds like is you trying to recall the vibes of the one time you've heard "Dancing in the Dark" years ago.

I guess it's fitting that this album is dropping toward the end of October because so many of these tracks just feel like bad Halloween costumes. Musically speaking. Really, though, if Halsey was going to do a cosplay of the influences that actually meaningfully impact the sound and writing process of this record, she would have dressed up as Avril and then as a young Taylor Swift, and that would have been it. Because when you dig into a lot of these tracks, the stale 2000s pop rock vibes, some of the melodies and songwriting ideas, that's actually what's at play here. That and the songs you only remember for their association with various teen flicks throughout the '90s and 2000s and family television dramas.

Speaking of which, why does every goddamn song on this record sound like it's being written from the perspective of some troubled girl character from those shows? Or I don't know, one of those Delaney Rowe skits on TikTok where she's pretending to be a character in some coming-of-age movie or like a girl from an indie film.

Now, granted, there are some pockets of this record where Halsey is going for this vibe, going for this sound, and she actually captures it pretty well and executes a good song in the process. Like on the track "Ego", which is a great, again, 2000s-era teen flick, credits roll type rocker. But simultaneously, when she sings about needing to kill her ego because it may, in fact, kill her, she was not kidding. Because this entire record has the worst cases of main character syndrome I've heard on any pop album in 2024. Not only due to the fact that this record subjects listeners to multiple indulgent cuts that sound like messy demos and just would not make it onto a more respectable release that was actually well conceptualized, most notably the draft track of "Life of the Spider".

So yeah, it's that. And also all of the lyrics on this record where it seems like Halsey is just hell-bent on making sure the audience knows just how dark and tortured and edgy she is. "Well they say all dogs go to heaven / Well what about a bitch? / What about an evil girl left lying in a ditch?" Jesus Christ. Again, it feels like she's bringing back so many ideas and elements from just very angsty rock music that came out of the '90s/2000s, but she is not allowing us to remember the stuff that made that music great or what made it popular in the first place. She's only holding onto the stuff that ended up being its downfall, the elements of it that aged the worst.

Halsey doesn't really seem interested in these styles of music for their aesthetics or what made them creative. Really, she only seems to be using them as a means of laundering untold amounts of just, again, childish angst and expecting us to sit here and wonder at it – just marvel at how mediocre it is at genre switching and making songs that sound absolutely nothing like the artists that supposedly inspired them.

Yeah, this album was a really tough listen, and frankly, in some pockets, laughable, which is why I'm feeling a light to decent 1 on it.

Halsey. The Great Impersonator. Forever.