Halsey - Hopeless Fountain Kingdom

The Guardian 60

The New Jersey singer’s voice is stifled by the mega-production and collaboration fest from industry A-listers that often follows a successful debut

Pop is thronged with notional female rebels, often marketing-led creations seeking to exploit some imagined patch of listenership by gyrating more attitudinally than the last bit of cannon fodder. Many 12-year-olds can sense this.

When New Jersey native Halsey came along, though, with her gamine hairdo, her bipolarity, her bisexuality and some plausibly autobiographical tales of overcoming bad chemical scenarios, pop received an unexpected new voice: flawed and gutsy, but still operating at a viable commercial intersection. The granular, sonically distinct storytelling of Ashley Frangipane’s hit debut, Badlands – a concept album – brought to mind a shopsoiled Taylor Swift (this is a compliment). Hit single New Americana epitomised a landscape in which genre strictures had withered away.