“I spent half my life being someone else. I never stopped to ask myself: Is this a person you’re proud to leave behind? Is it even you?” she asks in the video
Halsey will be a time-traveling, existential, question-answering Great Impersonator on her next album. On Tuesday, the pop star released the trailer for The Great Impersonator, a “confessional concept album” that will see her jump through decades with her sound.
“I really thought this album might be the last one I ever made. When you get sick like that, you start thinking about ways it could’ve all been different,” she says at the start of the video. “What if this isn’t how it all went down? 18-year-old Ashley becomes Halsey in 2014.”
The trailer jumps between clips of Halsey with her in different outfits from over the decades. “What if I debuted in the early 2000s?” she asks before a clip of her Britney Spears-sampling song “Lucky.”
“The Nineties? The Eighties? The Seventies?” Halsey asks as she previews different songs off her album that touch on genres from each era. Clips play of her dressed as versions of herself if she existed in each decade.
“Am I still Halsey every time? In every timeline? Do I still get sick? Do I become a mom? Am I happy? Lonely? Have I done enough? Have I told the truth?” she says in the video.
The clip dramatically ends with Halsey asking herself: “I spent half my life being someone else. I never stopped to ask myself: Is this a person you’re proud to leave behind? Is it even you?”
Halsey marked her return by dropping “The End” in early June. The song detailed her experience being diagnosed with Lupus SLE and a rare T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder and was aimed to be a letter to her fans. She followed that track with pop track “Lucky” and the dark rock song “Lonely Is the Muse.” The Great Impersonator marks her fifth album after 2021’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power.
“For every Halsey pop song, there’s a Halsey rock song to match… I like to do both, so I feel like I shouldn’t have to choose,” she said of the new era earlier this summer.
Halsey’s debut album, Badlands, was released in 2015. It was followed by Hopeless Fountain Kingdom in 2017, Manic in 2020, and If I Can’t Have Love in 2021.
