Written from her own perspective, Halsey’s third album flips lonely self-awareness into a kind of strength. But some of its most compelling moments are overpowered by the tedium of modern pop.
After decades of pop-culture hegemony, the gendered tropes around break-ups have finally been supplanted. Instead of tubs of ice cream and days spent wallowing on a couch, modern heartbreak is mitigated by the promise of a social media glow-up and encouraged by a culture obsessed with both wellness and politicizing the personal. A breakup is not the failure of a relationship, this contemporary approach preaches, but an opportunity for growth, no matter how uncomfortable. Or maybe it’s an expression of heteronormative hostility; men, we learn, are trash. Either way, pain can be a messy, divinely timed intervention from the universe. Manic, the third album by Halsey, is an unlikely, but effective, manifestation of this new convention. I can imagine many listeners finding comfort across its 16 songs, and similarly bridging angst and self-discovery to navigate personal crises of their own.
A handful of Manic’s first six singles, among them the “Cry Me a River”-interpolating Billboard No. 1 “Without Me” and the country-pop manifesto “You Should Be Sad,” are rooted in the exploration of deep pain and what Halsey has described as an interest in “female rage.” That explains the lingering influence of artists once written off as angry women: Shania Twain, Alanis Morissette, and pre-acrobatics P!nk. (That more than a third of the album’s songs were released in its lead-up points to an altogether different convention: the pop album as a compilation of market-tested singles.) Notably, Halsey describes the album as the first project she has written as herself, New Jersey’s Ashley Frangipane, and not under the protective cover of her alter ego. Unlike 2017’s hopeless fountain kingdom and 2015’s BADLANDS, Manic is not structured around an elaborate fictional framework.
For Halsey, autobiography offers opportunity; her ability to translate the arc of her life—schoolyard misfit turned aspiring bohème turned Tumblr microcelebrity turned misunderstood pop star—is among the qualities upon which she has established her career. She does well in framing some of those personal experiences as concepts, on standout songs like the pop-rock drunk-texting anthem “3am” and the melodramatic revenge drama “killing boys,” both of which manage to flip lonely self-awareness into a kind of strength. On the former, a song that deserves a bright future as a karaoke classic, she begs: “My insecurities are hurtin’ me/Someone please come and flirt with me.” Who among us hasn’t been there?
Sadly, some of the album’s most compelling moments are overpowered by the tedium of modern pop. There are painfully stretched ballads, overly sanitized rhythms, a hint of indeterminately “tropical” energy, and back-to-back booming hooks à la Sia. (Halsey’s first record company was Astralwerks, the mostly electronic label with whom Sia released an album in 2004.) Alongside guest appearances from Morissette, Dominic Fike, and Suga of BTS, Halsey’s collaborators on Manic include Greg Kurstin, Benny Blanco, and Jon Bellion, some of the world’s foremost hitmakers and shapers of the amorphous, chameleonic pop I’ve come to associate with sitting miserably in the backseat of a Lyft. Their presence here is felt a little too acutely.
Though Manic features Halsey’s take on a handful of different genres—broody pop-R&B reminiscent of her early work; alt-rock-lite that is an aesthetic match to her persona; twangy country-pop sure to find a home on certain segments of pop radio—much of it has the same reflective surface and, at some points, the depth of an oil slick. The Morissette collab “Alanis’ Interlude,” which features a reference to John Mayer’s “Your Body Is a Wonderland,” is almost too irritating to endure: “Your pussy is a wonderland,” the pair warbles, infinitely more times than necessary. It is a low point for someone who is at times a clever songwriter.
Despite some missteps, Halsey’s appeal is clear: It’s a singularly difficult time to be a young person, and she is warmly attuned to that reality. “I don’t wanna be somebody in America just fighting the hysteria,” she sings on the album opener “Ashley,” framing her personal frustrations within the broader sociopolitical context shaping our collective experiences. What does it mean to be a woman in pain in a country that dismisses you? What is the significance of loneliness in a society that seems to require it? How much compassion does a broken self deserve? On Manic, Halsey proves she isn’t quite the radical she thinks she is. But maybe she doesn’t have to be.
Buy: Rough Trade
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