Halsey Emerges Whole from the Ghosts of the Past on 'The Great Impersonator (Deluxe)': Album Review
- Abby Anderson
- 9 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Stand-out tracks: "Alice of the Upper Class" "Charades"
Our favorites: "Carry the Weight" "Lessons"
Release date: May 1, 2027
Label: Columbia Records
For fans of: Avril Lavigne, The Warning, Lorde
We’ve seen many iterations of Halsey across their career. She appeared on the music scene as a mermaid-blue-haired 20-year-old, rising to popularity in the age of Tumblr-core and alt-pop with Badlands. She became a household name thanks to the mass success of "Closer" in 2016. She became the subject of unnecessary tabloid scrutiny for her relationships and open criticism of the music industry on Manic. She battled health challenges for years, and became a mother and a business owner. Halsey has spent the last year on their largest tour in a decade with the For My Last Trick Tour and just a few months later, took a victory lap on the Back to Badlands Tour in celebration of a decade of their debut album. But just like the illusion painted on The Great Impersonator, Halsey was hard at work behind the scenes crafting the seven deluxe songs that conclude the story and make up her surprise release: The Great Impersonator (Deluxe), released May 1 via Columbia Records.
Multidimensional, ever-fluxing, and utterly defenseless, the original The Great Impersonator is an incredibly executed, tangibly existential ultimatum in album form. It’s heavy, it’s honest, and it’s laced with the fragility of living with the uncertainty of your own mortality. But with the addition of it's epilogue, The Great Impersonator (Deluxe) sees Halsey back in control of the narrative, healed and whole, and more human than a character playing a part.
On the original album, Halsey’s identity morphed and blurred with those of their sonic inspirations, with certain tracks like "I Believe in Magic" and "The End" having emerged as perhaps the most revealing moments on the record as she got vulnerable about motherhood and medical battles. Other tracks like "Lonely is the Muse" and "Lucky" became so sonically intertwined as impersonations of Evanescence and Britney Spears respectively that their narratives about abandonment and exploitation deceived the more passive of listeners. This was the trick of The Great Impersonator – it gave glimpses into Halsey’s personal battles without giving concrete answers about anything.
There were artistic nuances across the original album as well; Halsey’s son appeared in the backing track of "I Believe in Magic", offering a glimpse into the little joys in their life together. But it was paired with the haunting reappearance of that child’s voice in the final of three Letter[s] to God (1998) where she cries out, “And I don't ever wanna leave him, but I don't think its my choice/So, I’m basking in these moments where I feel a shred of joy.” And the back half of the album undeniably held some of the most ambitious, most agonizing music of Halsey’s discography: "I Never Loved You" read as simple but brutal, "Darwinism" as crushingly existential, and the title track itself closed the original version of album with Halsey exposing every exploitative detail of her story, where she posed one last question: “Does the story die with its narrator?”
The deluxe tracks bring to fruition the story of the For My Last Trick Tour, where Halsey interwove narrative features of Alice in Wonderland with their own story, with "Lucid" alluding to the "Got one to make you big / Got one to make you small enough to crawl / I'm gonna try them all" and previously-released bonus track "Alice of the Upper Class" simply stating "Like Alice through the looking glass / I'm tired of the upper class / I wanna go back, go back, go back, go back, go back!". It's a fine line between understanding truth and deception, identity and persona, while coming to terms with the fact that identity might not just be one thing.
But Halsey's humanity pulls through stronger than before on "Carry the Weight." She's dropping the pretenses of performing, dropping the facade of eternal patience, and moving forward more whole than ever: "No, I don't care how you describe me / It's always your world we live in / All your delusional fantasies setting the scene / And by the time you're forgiven / No, you won't even recognize me." We find Halsey somewhere in the in between on "Lessons," where the pressure to perform challenges personal integrity. Leaning more into the pop side of Halsey's sonic persona, it feels authentic and dazzling while simultaneously challenging how it's possible to be dazzling from a place of authenticity. And ultimately? It all comes down to control. Halsey continues to explore the concept of control on "Nothing!," a lyric heavy deliberation that fights between "I want control / I'll give it all to make me whole / But then I have nothing."
While "The Great Impersonator" concluded the original album on a note of despair, "Charades" ends this chapter for Halsey on a note of power. Introducing this final act with the stylistic "Ladies and gentlemen / You are about to witness / The most death-defying leap ever attempted / Watch her closely" called out by a third-party narrator, Halsey makes it clear that that leap is the choice to merge all sides of herself into one: the performer and the mother, the human and the reputation, the lover and the fighter. Reclaiming a beat pattern that mimics that of "You Should Be Sad" from Manic and acoustics that recall back to where we began with "Only Girl in LA," Halsey emerges as whole, free of the ghosts of the past, and even more clever than ever as she poses a new final question: "I don't wanna give it away / And I know you could get it if you paid attention / Are you any good at charades?"
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