Album Review | ‘The Great Impersonator’ by Halsey

Halsey returns with a genre-bending tour of the decades as she navigates mortality, depression, and fame.

Cover art for Halsey’s The Great Impersonator album courtesy of Columbia records(Photo from Genius)

Halsey was dealt a serious hand coming out of quarantine. Coming off of the promotion of her rock-inspired prior album If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, and having her first child, her health began to deteriorate.

She has opened up about her struggles with Bipolar disorder in the past. Now, her greatest struggle would be with how sick Lupus and T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder made her.

This spurred much more introspection into her fate, which she confessed to Paper Magazine weighed heavy on this project:

“What kept coming up for me was this question about fate. I feel like when you get sick like that, the first thing you start thinking is: ‘Is there anything that I could have done for this not to happen?’ It kept coming up over and over again.” — Halsey via Paper Magazine (2024)

This led her to fear that this could be her last album, and as such, she wanted to make all the things that inspired her out of it. The record's promotion included impersonations of artists like David Bowie, Björk, Dolly Parton, and many more, whom she channeled for each track on the album. Its pivot…