By By Larisha Paul (Rolling Stone)
Halsey has a few more tricks up their sleeve on the deluxe edition of their fifth album, The Great Impersonator. The musician expanded the album with five previously unreleased songs, including the pop-rock record “Carry the Weight,” which was premiered on the For My Last Trick Tour.
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“It was really important to me that you guys got every song I intended for you to hear in the TGI cycle,” Halsey shared in a statement announcing the release. “Here is the final punctuation on that long sentence.” The deluxe edition adds “Lucid,” which was also performed on tour, as well as “Lessons,” “Nothing,” and “Charades.” It also includes the demo “Afraid of the Dark.”
The records build on the premise of The Great Impersonator, which was created as a concept album after Halsey was diagnosed with Lupus SLE and a rare T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder. They thought the album might be the last they would ever make and poured their grief, fear, and resilience into it. “Can you see that I’m bleeding on the stage?” she asks on “Charades.”
The Great Impersonator arrived in October 2024 as Halsey’s first release under Columbia Records. “I’m so grateful to everyone at Columbia Records who played a part in bringing this to life and getting it into the world,” Halsey wrote in their statement. They signed with the label in 2023 after parting ways with Capitol Records. In September, Halsey told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that she was, at the time, “not allowed” to make an album because The Great Impersonator “didn’t perform the way they wanted it to.”
“If I’m being honest with you, the album sold 100,000 fucking copies first week,” Halsey said. “That’s a pretty big first week, especially for an artist who hasn’t had a hit in a long time.” The streak of success continued with the For My Last Trick Tour, which she shared was the highest-selling tour of her career.
“It would be considered a success for most artists, 100,000 albums in the first week, in an era when we don’t sell physical music,” she said. “But it’s a failure in the context of the kind of success I’ve had previously. And that’s the hardest part of having been a pop star once, because I’m not one anymore, and I’m being compared to people that I don’t consider lateral to me.”
In a review of The Great Impersonator, Rolling Stone‘s Rob Sheffield wrote, “There’s a constant tension between the playful wit in the music and the sluggish gloom of the vocals. But the best moments on The Great Impersonator come when the music wins out. Playing around with the past seems to shake up her imagination — and point her toward the future.”
