Halsey - Badlands

Pitchfork 49

Halsey is the stage name of Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, a 20-year-old New Jersey native who has cultivated a dedicated following with just one EP to her name, last year's Room 93. With a shock of blue hair and vocal control beyond her years, Halsey arrived with just five songs and a buzzed-about live show. Since then she became the most tweeted-about artist at SXSW, toured with Imagine Dragons, and was the subject of a fascinating New York Times profile that explored her identity as a "biracial, bisexual and bipolar" artist. To boot, Halsey's debut album, Badlands' latest single, "New Americana", recently premiered on Apple Music's Beats 1 with an enthusiastic endorsement from Zane Lowe: "There’s a new icon there," he said, possibly making it so by fiat.

The momentum behind Halsey is undeniable, but Badlands mostly falls flat. At its best, the record plays like a conflagration of a half-decade's worth of alt-R&B—catchy, dark, spottily engaging. But it is weighed down by trite lyrics and stale production: The details of her story wind up far more interesting than the music itself, which is a weird place to be for a superstar-in-the-making.

Badlands opens with "Castle", an unhurried track with a trip-hop backbone that serves as a meditation on Halsey's growing fame. "Sick of all these people talking, sick of all this noise," she sings, ready to reject celebrity like an industry pro from the get-go. "And there's an old man sitting on the throne that's saying that I probably shouldn't be so mean," she sings, taking a jab at the patriarchy; it's one of the occasional moments on Badlands where Halsey's personality emerges and the knives come out. But sonically, "Castle" is dull; a misguided plainchant interlude threatens to derail the track early on and the soupy production never quite congeals.

Elsewhere, Halsey's choices are even clunkier. "New Americana" reconstitutes Lana Del Rey's Hollywood Babylon-isms and Lorde's tongue-in-cheekiness as a millennial call-to-arms: "Viral mess, turned dreams into an empire/ Self-made success, now she rolls with Rockafellas," Halsey sings, piling on the Gen Y bromides. She runs down a "big issues" checklist, from social media fame (good? bad? maybe both!) to wealth inequality (a problem, no doubt!), and her concerns come across as plasticky and surface-level.

"New Americana" isn't the only time Halsey evokes Del Rey. "Drive" hews close to the Lizzy Grant playbook, with saccharine strings and West Coast anhedonia that has Ultraviolence written all over it. The more successful tracks tend to be the ones that feel personal and specific. "Ghost", which also appeared on Halsey's EP, gives you a sense of what she can do when the scale is smaller. The track is a sinuous synth-pop love song whose economical runtime plays in its favor; one can almost forgive the music video for being yet another Enter the Void knockoff. "Hurricane", a bonus track that doubled as an early single, also has a striking specificity to its unusually bleak lyrics: "He's got an eye for girls of eighteen/ And he turns them out like tricks," Halsey sings, painting a troubling picture of a traumatic youth.

Reading interviews with Halsey or scrolling through her Twitter feed, you get the sense of a canny and talented performer, one who legitimately wants to connect with fans. But the public persona only comes through on Badlands in fits and starts, and there isn't a single subversive or original second on the album. "We are the new Americana/ High on legal marijuana/ Raised on Biggie and Nirvana," goes the chorus on "New Americana." Like most of Badlands, it's calculated, defiant, and, ultimately, hollow.