Success accelerates any artist’s timeline, but especially pop stars, who inevitably use their experiences as direct fuel for the music. Their then-disintegrating relationship sparked many of the album’s songs, though Halsey uses many of her lyrics to excoriate her own flaws. Halsey was working with more established pop producers - Greg Kurstin, Benny Blanco, Ricky Reed - alongside her frequent collaborator and ex Lido.

Gone are the windswept, movie-trailer soundscapes, replaced with more taut, rhythmic beats. Hopeless Fountain Kingdom feels smaller in scale than Badlands. The album opens with her reciting Shakespeare’s prologue to the play, but beyond the high concept, Halsey had truly found herself. Unafraid to come off as pretentious, she revealed the album’s gender-swapped Romeo & Juliet story through an elaborate alternate reality game: setting up Twitter and Spotify profiles for its characters, mailing clues to fans. “Not Afraid Anymore” was as dramatic as anything on Badlands, but she sang with a redoubled confidence, showing off a newfound vocal strength.Īfter Halsey started teasing her upcoming second album, titled Hopeless Fountain Kingdom, things immediately felt different.

On 2017’s Fifty Shades Darker soundtrack, Halsey quietly upstaged Zayn and Taylor Swift. The song’s massive success could easily have defined Halsey’s career for life, but she used her newfound household-name status to vault the perception of her own music beyond alt-pop, into the stratosphere. “Closer” was her first song to top the Billboard Hot 100, staying there for 12 consecutive weeks - and was eventually certified Diamond. Halsey more than held her own her high belt at the end of the bridge provided the song’s much-needed climactic moment of release. “Closer” was more self-aware than many gave it credit for: it was a deliberate anti-love song, delivered by two unlikeable, yet sympathetic narrators trapped in a cycle of self-loathing memories. In mid-2016 came another duet - The Chainsmokers’ “Closer,” which changed everything. The same year, Halsey was the sole woman to land a coveted guest spot on Justin Bieber’s Purpose - though on “The Feeling,” she’s more of a dreamy, disembodied presence than a real personality. Badlands wasn’t the destination - it was the start of the journey. That distance is never clearer than on the album’s divisive second single “New Americana,” the first Halsey song many listeners heard, where she declared her intentions with a children’s choir over a martial beat: “We are the new Americana/ Raised on Biggie and Nirvana/ High on legal marijuana!” She called it satire, but the song felt relentless, not sympathetic, and its teen-dystopia video came at the tail end of Hunger Games and Divergent franchise fatigue.ĭespite the hype, and some notable negative reviews, Halsey was making music that reflected her honest point of view - even if she didn’t always have the perspective to fully articulate her themes. As a result, she often expresses her feelings in the abstract, before the listener had a sense of the real person behind the Tumblr-poetry imagery. “Roman Holiday” is Springsteen via Taylor Swift’s 1989, adventurous and romantic: “Late December, with my heart in my chest/ And the clouds of my breath/ Didn’t know where we were running to/ But don’t look back…” “Colors” is even better - a starry-eyed ballad juxtaposed with lyrics about falling out of love with someone.ĭespite the concept, there’s no strict narrative - the Badlands are a metaphor for Halsey’s oft-distant, isolated mental state. Those more cinematic tracks are impressive, but looking back, Badlands is at its best when the stakes are lower, where she’s more precise with her words. “Castle” and “Hold Me Down” open the album with grandiose electro-pop and combative lyrics, nodding to the opposition she’d already faced as a woman in the music industry. A concept album about the inhabitants of a dystopian wasteland, Badlands aimed high, but was ultimately just as interesting for its occasional stumbles. 2 on the Billboard 200 - an instant commercial success without a traditional radio hit. Upon its release in August 2015, Halsey’s first album Badlands debuted at No.

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