this album honestly fell into my lap thru this short on youtube. (you can find the full interview here) in this short, halsey is interviewed by zane lowe and she mentions that she cannot make another album. then she mentions this album, 'the great impersonator' - saying that even though it did great in its first week with over 100,000 individual sales, her label is "not allowing her to make another album since it did terribly compared to manic". 'manic' was an album that halsey releaesed in 2020, and i imagine she mentioned this album because it went platinum several times. she mentions in this interview that she thinks her label is not allowing her to make another album because this one didn't do so well compared to 'manic', and that she honestly think that's unfair.

i am not an avid halsey fan. i am familiar with badlands only because it released when i was in high school, and i heavily disliked it only really due to my distaste then (and even now, admittedly) with overhyped, billboard top 100 music. this album is very much NOT that. in the short i linked earlier, halsey calls this album an "experimental concept album" about how she nearly died. to be quite honest, just hearing her describe her work like that made me more interested to check it out. this is a far cry from the music she made nearly a decade ago, with this heavy melancholy and pain being a major theme of this body of work. when i listened to the first two songs, 'only girl in la' and 'ego', i knew i was going to be hooked into this album. there is very little of the pop sound that she had when we were both a decade younger. she approaches each of these tracks with this softness, with many of the tracks making feel like i needed to be looking out of a car window while its raining or to be on the beach during a cloudy day. this is a sound that wants you to know that they are mourning, they are in pain, and now despite all of that they are processing and expressing that thru this album.

update, october 2025 : this is my favorite halsey album without a doubt. i made sure to listen to the other albums i'm familiar with her for - BADLANDS (2015) and MANIC (2020) - and just decided that they all just cannot be compared with each other. this is her at a different time. she's a mother, she's gone thru all kinds of personal strifes - notably health struggles - and kept it rather private, she's got a higher bar for her musical and overal creative expressiveness than she did a whole decade ago. i am standing by the original three songs that i put as my favorites - 'ego', 'panic attack' and 'lonely is the muse' - but i now wish to add ALL the iterations of 'letter to god' and 'dog years' to the list. the following is a breakdown of some of these tracks and why i think they're the highlights of the album for me.

• 'dog years' - as the third track on the album it is a tempered down vibe compared to its predecessor 'ego', coming in with a more sinister and darker tone held by the acoustics and halsey's low singing. the lyrics "i didn't ask to live, but dying's up to me" and "they say all dogs go to heaven - well what about a bitch?" are highlights of this song for me. this song is one of the tracks on her album that directly discusses her declining health, as she references "going to the farm" or being "in a better place". part of me wonders if this song is a little disjointed on purpose. it can be a little confusing to hear halsey talk about her dead dog, and then pivot to talking about her ongoing health issues. so current understanding of this track is that she grieves her late dog and thinks about what it would be like to be called a good girl as she passes on to a supposed better existence after this one. at the end, halsey proclaims, "i am 196 in dog years, i have seen enough - i have seen enough" before one last go of the chorus. halsey is saying thru this song that at 28, she has seen enough, further emphasizing how much she has seen by changing the metric of her age to 'dog years'.
• 'ego' - this is the second track of the album, a much brighter and punchier song compared to the intro to this album, 'only living girl in la'. this track is punchy, but upon hearing the lyrics you hear halsey berating herself for all the things she is noticing about herself that she doesn't like. halsey points out how she suffers from bad mental health and omits telling her mother, she calls herself a grownup baby, and admits that she misses how things used to be when she was early in her career. she's afraid of messing up and doesn't feel like herself most days. this song is ironic, as it is a very catchy alternative pop-rock track with lyrics that describe less than cheery situations and thoughts. this irony in expression forces the listener to really pay attention to what she's saying, kind of how people in her real life might have had to focus on how halsey was behaving and what she was saying in order to know if she was ok. when i hear this song, i always cry out "i think that i shoul try to kill my ego!" each time halsey does haha. it's like a sarcastic yet serious callout to the self, like yeah, i really should just try to focus on what's really important and keep moving forward as much as i can. though, i think in this track halsey really just is frustrated with her own thoughts and feelings and expressing it in this slightly self-deprecating demeanor seems on purpose.

this album, to me at least, is rihanna's magnum opus. it's a daring claim to make when she's had several bombastic releases in her career - UNAPOLOGETIC (2011), LOUD (2010), RATED R (2009) - along with house and dance classics like THIS IS WHAT YOU CAME FOR with calvin harris. i will fully admit that this came out while i was in high school and really feeling the drama of being a teenager. this album, however, to me exposes a side of rihanna that feels a bit more raw, her vocals breaking beautifully at some points of some songs like LOVE ON THE BRAIN and KISS IT BETTER. you'll see me use the word 'raw' a lot to describe a lot of the vocal stuff that i like lol sorry about that, but it's the best way that i can describe when vocals sound "naked", in the sense that there's not too much worry of making it sound extremely polished. in this album, rihanna's vocals make you feel like you're seated at the back of a bar watching her perform after a long night, a call to evenings that turn to early mornings due to the stresses of relationships and life in general. over the years, rihanna's voice has matured and rounded out, with her singing in this album taking a deeper tone. rihanna draws out her runs and phrases in a somewhat lethargic way, stringing everything together so effortlessly in a melancholic, lovesick way. i adore the way she sings.

the sounds of this album are also quite unlike a lot of what she has previously released. the way this album starts out is heavy and open ending, grabbing the attention of the listener with a good amount of bass-forward sounds in the first half, but later transitioning to slower, lower-end synths. this polarization also helps highlight the way rihanna sings in each track. everything uplifts what she sings. while there are many tracks in this album that fit into rihanna's specific brand of club music (WORK FT DRAKE, CONSIDERATION FT SZA, SEX WITH ME), a lot of this album also takes a step back from that, each song a story or a comment surrounding relationships and the intensity of it, substances and their effects, and a celebration of femininity and individualism.

my favorite tracks from this album:

• LOVE ON THE BRAIN - the way this track rises and falls between the verses just like the ups and downs of being in love... your honour i'm afraid it is rather sublime. my absolute favorite performance of this was when she sang this live in germany. when she lets herself go and belts out those high notes, letting her voice crack from emotion in such an artful and powerful way, i tear up each time i hear it. it's as if she's wailing thru her singing, wailing about how intense this love feels and how awful it is to maybe not having a reciprocation of those feelings. navigating relationships and our own individual experiences with how we feel about them can be a pretty gruelling process especially if you're worried about things not working out. this track is a call to how being so in love can maybe distort how things actually are, but you cannot help but still want them. this song is a call to validate these intense feelings, to find a way to hold onto something of this person that she is so infatuated with.