Music Review: In illness, Halsey tells deep truths on ambitious, reflective 'The Great Impersonator'

“Long story short, I’m lucky to be alive,” are the words Halsey chose to introduce their fifth studio album, “The Great Impersonator.”

Born Ashley Frangipane, the pop singer who uses she/they pronouns shared the note on Instagram in June, later revealing she'd been privately battling both a form of lupus and a rare T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder since 2022. “The Great Impersonator,” out Friday, is a chronicle of that time, made in the space of survival. And it wasn't only health crises and treatment threatening their well-being: Across the last two years, she was also dropped from her longtime label and separated from the father of their son.

In some ways, “The Great Impersonator” is an artifact of someone not sure they'll live to make another record. It's full of reflection, from the early days of her career, the whirlwind that followed and the existential wisdom that comes when cutting it close to death.

It may seem ironic, then, that on this album — the one that feels like an artist trying to get to the core of their interiority — she's chosen to compose songs that directly pull from her greatest inspirations. Each song is a kind of impersonation of another performer, filtered through her own songwriting style. But that's exactly the point: Halsey has been chameleonic across their career, a forerunner in the internet's age of genre-averse alt-pop. What is truest to them may very well be an album of impressions.

It's a return to both the music that made Halsey a teenage superstar all those years ago and the influences that were previously hidden from their work. In the former category, there’s the interpolation of Britney Spears on “Lucky,” the shoegaze-meets-nu-metal “Lonely is the Muse,” where Deftones and Evanescence can be heard in equal measure, the pop-punky, Third Eye Blind-like “Ego” and the folky “The End.”

Elsewhere, there's the big-hearted, reverbed Bruce Springsteen-channeling “Letter to God (1983),” lest anyone forget Halsey is from New Jersey. Sonically, “Hometown” is Halsey's cursive-singing take on Dolly Parton; “Arsonist,” a near-parody of Fiona Apple. “Panic Attack” pulls a Stevie Nicks, while the title track is her homage to Björk.

“The Great Impersonator” is also about an artist rectifying their relationship with fame and by extension, career. Halsey's blockbuster pop singles appear to be a thing of the past, a necessary sacrifice to make the most interesting work of their career. Her last album, 2021's “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power,” saw Halsey teaming up with Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for an industrial concept record on motherhood and the Freudian “Madonna-whore complex.” It is her most ambitious work, and what she has recently called her least commercially successful release. “The Great Impersonator” is aware of that legacy, and instead of attempting to reclaim traditional markers of achievement, bucks up against them.

In the opening track, “Only Living Girl in LA,” Halsey offers both brutal honesty and crippling satire: “I don’t know if I could sell out my own funeral (Ah-ah) / At least not at this point in time.” Near the end, the folky opener fractures into explosive distortion — something that might be at home on an Alex G record. He is one of this album's producers, along with Michael Uzowuru, known for his work with SZA, Frank Ocean, FKA Twigs, Beyoncé and more.

But those collaborators are only a piece of “The Great Impersonator,” of course, an album that feels truest to Halsey — strangely, arriving in a moment where she's made herself the least available she has ever been to the public. It's an ambitious, contemplative album — self-involved and hyper-referential — perhaps the best document yet of the person behind the moniker.