‘The Great Impersonator’ Album Review: The Most Boring Form of Flattery

On Oct. 5, American singer-songwriter Halsey released their fifth studio album, “The Great Impersonator.” The artist’s first album in three years and following a series of health struggles, the record paints a deeply vulnerable portrait of Halsey through “impersonations” of past artists. However, the project’s lack of musical complexity ultimately restricts its potential, resulting in an uneven album that creates a lukewarm listening experience.

Halsey has historically gravitated toward high-concept albums, from “Romeo and Juliet” inspiring 2017’s “hopeless fountain kingdom” to the medieval body-horror storyline of 2021’s “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power.” The concept of “The Great Impersonator” is evident in its title: The album is an exercise in imitation, taking its primary inspiration from Halsey’s artistic role models. An 18-day Instagram countdown to its release featured the artist recreating famous photos of the musical icons that the album seeks to emulate — Cher, Stevie Nicks, and Kate Bush, to name a few.

But successful imitation requires, on some level, either outdoing the source material — which is difficult when you’re riffing on artists like Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, and Fiona Apple — or transforming it into your own. Too many tracks on “The Great Impersonator” feel like facsimile rather than reimagination, resulting in songs that are catchy on a baseline level — after all, Halsey is copying the greats — but fail to offer much that’s new. The Dolly Parton-inspired country song “Hometown” is delightfully playful, but you could experience a better effect by listening to Parton herself.

Several of these tracks distinguish themselves from their spiritual predecessors through lyrical content. In “The Great Impersonator,” derivative melodies brush up counterintuitively against deeply personal songwriting that explores Halsey’s perception of their body, illness, and motherhood.

“The Great Impersonator” arrives in the wake of Halsey’s experience with chronic illness. On June 4, they released the album’s first single, “The End,” alongside a donation to the Lupus Research Alliance and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, disclosing that they had been diagnosed with lupus and a lymphoproliferative disorder in 2022.

“Every couple of years now, a doctor says I’m sick,” the track begins.

As this opening line may suggest, “The Great Impersonator” is an album about being sick. Over a third of the album’s songs, no matter what artist or genre inspired them, directly reference Halsey’s illness. “I shaved my head four times because I wanted to / And then I did it one more time ’cause I got sick,” they sing on “Lucky.”

Throughout their career, Halsey has ping-ponged between high-concept alternative music and radio-friendly pop — most notably with “Closer,” their 2016 chart-topping collaboration with The Chainsmokers. “The Great Impersonator” appears to follow this pattern. “Panic Attack” and — to a lesser extent — “Ego” are catchy but lukewarm pop tracks, destined for department store radio play.

And then there’s the rest of the album. Halsey’s alternative B-sides have always been where their sonic imagination truly shines, but many of the songs on “The Great Impersonator” largely forgo innovative production in favor of a stripped-back, acoustic sound on tracks such as “Darwinism” and “The End,” allowing the lyrics to come to the forefront.

But all too often, the songwriting in “The Great Impersonator” isn’t strong enough to compensate for its sonic austerity. Songs like “Hurt Feelings” rely on repetitive choruses and simple storytelling, and the metaphors in some other tracks are occasionally too on the nose. Take the song “Dog Years,” where Halsey asks, “They say all dogs go to Heaven / Well, what about a bitch?”

Even the inconsistent lyrical quality would be less of an issue if it weren’t for the album’s length. “The Great Impersonator” is an 18-song album with a runtime of one hour and six minutes — Halsey’s longest ever. While there’s certainly no need to bow to current trends that favor shorter projects, the album’s combined length and lack of variation throughout make it a bit of a slog to get through in one sitting. A few uptempo songs like “Hometown” and the alt-rock “Lonely Is the Muse” break up the monotony, but not often enough.

The album’s second half is stronger than its first. “Arsonist,” a scathing address to a destructive ex-lover, is a standout track. Halsey’s low, guttural vocals cut through an instrumental that can only be described as menacing, expertly transitioning into spoken word in the song’s outro.

“Arsonist” is followed by the quiet ballad “Life of the Spider (Draft),” titled as such because of its spare, demo-like instrumental. “I don’t think I could have done it as a complete production,” Halsey wrote on X. It’s a song that does acoustic simplicity right, with its ultra-minimal piano track highlighting the song’s extended metaphor of Halsey as a “hideous” spider that everyone wants to kill. “God, how could I even think of daring to exist?” they sing, emotion palpable in their voice.

The personal takes center stage in the album’s songwriting, and it feels more than ever that Halsey is laying themself bare. But from a song recorded in a mere 30 minutes to the inclusion of their young son’s voice in “Letter to God (1998),” “The Great Impersonator” unfortunately relies a bit too much upon the rawness of its themes alone, letting its technical aspects slip into musical mediocrity.

“The Great Impersonator” will mean a lot to a lot of people: those who relate to its themes of chronic illness and motherhood, those who resonate strongly with its lyrics, and likely Halsey themself. This project seems to have been written for the artist alone, and because of this, my opinion on whether its tactic of raw lyricism against spare production strikes the intended chord doesn’t really matter. The album isn’t one I’ll be returning to — but it deserves to have been written.

—Staff writer Samantha H. Chung can be reached at samantha.chung@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @samhchung.