The wasteland came first. Ashley Nicolette Frangipane grew up in New Jersey, learned violin, viola and cello before turning toward guitar, and began posting music online as a teenager. The name Halsey connected an anagram of Ashley with Halsey Street in Brooklyn, creating a public identity before the records had fully defined what it meant. “Ghost,” uploaded to SoundCloud, attracted industry attention and led to a deal with Astralwerks, followed by the 2014 EP Room 93. A year later, Badlands placed songs including “New Americana,” “Colors,” “Gasoline” and “Castle” inside an imagined dystopian landscape. The concept gave intensely personal writing somewhere larger to live, establishing a habit Halsey would return to repeatedly as the subjects became more intimate.
Pop success arrived fast enough to complicate that identity. Halsey’s appearance on the Chainsmokers’ “Closer” spent 12 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2016, placing their voice inside one of the decade’s biggest singles. hopeless fountain kingdom followed in 2017 with a framework inspired by Romeo and Juliet, while its production moved further into R&B and mainstream pop. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and “Bad at Love” reached No. 5 on the Hot 100. “Without Me” stripped away much of the fictional architecture in 2018 and eventually became Halsey’s first solo Hot 100 No. 1. That directness carried into 2020’s Manic, where “Graveyard,” “You should be sad” and collaborations with Alanis Morissette, Dominic Fike and SUGA sat together without requiring one invented world to make sense of them.
If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power made the music heavier and the surrounding character more elaborate. Produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the 2021 album used industrial electronics, distorted guitars, punk abrasion and quieter acoustic passages to examine pregnancy, sexuality, motherhood and control. Its accompanying film cast Halsey inside a gothic story of queenship and bodily autonomy, extending the record rather than merely illustrating it. Three years later, The Great Impersonator approached identity from another direction. Released in October 2024 after Halsey disclosed serious health struggles, the album imagined songs through the influence and visual language of artists including David Bowie, Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen, Amy Lee, PJ Harvey and Dolores O’Riordan. It debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, giving Halsey a fifth consecutive studio album to reach the chart’s Top 2.
The record continued to grow after its original cycle. Halsey supported it with 2025’s For My Last Trick Tour, which they later described as the highest-selling tour of their career, while also reviving Badlands for its tenth anniversary through an anthology of demos, remixes, orchestral recordings and archival material. The Back to Badlands Tour carried that anniversary into February 2026, but the year did not remain focused on the debut. The Great Impersonator (Deluxe) arrived May 1st with 25 tracks, adding “Lucid,” “Carry the Weight,” “Lessons,” “Nothing!,” “Charades” and other material intended for the album’s larger cycle. Summer brought another transformation through The Girl in the Tower, a theatrical festival show that reorganized songs from across Halsey’s catalog around characters including the Mother and the Maiden. After performances across Europe, the production became Halsey’s first official concert film, released globally on August 27th.
The Girl in the Tower makes the pattern running through Halsey’s career unusually easy to see. “Nightmare,” “I am not a woman, I’m a god,” “Castle,” “Dog Years,” “You asked for this” and “Lonely is the Muse” come from different albums, yet the concert rearranges them around another invented structure rather than treating chronology as the organizing principle. Halsey returned to the stage at Rock in Rio on September 13th with material spanning Badlands, Manic, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power and The Great Impersonator, and no additional shows are currently announced. The pause arrives after a year spent looking backward and sideways at once, expanding the newest album while rebuilding older songs for another theatrical identity. That is why the characters matter. Halsey has rarely used them to create distance from personal material. The dystopian resident, doomed lover, gothic queen, great impersonator and girl in the tower have repeatedly provided the opposite, another route toward saying something more directly than autobiography alone might allow.