Album Review: Halsey Reveals All on the Perfectly Imperfect 'Manic'

Halsey proves she’s only getting started with Manic, her most beautifully vulnerable and experimental album to date.

Written by Minnah Zaheer

Halsey’s first two albums, Badlands and hopeless fountain kingdom, take place in dystopian alternate realities and come with extended lore not just found in the songs, but also in the packaging, promotion, and tour experiences for each album. Their narratives tell stories of fictional characters grounded in real-world experiences but ultimately far away from them. With Manic, Halsey finally makes a record that’s about the here and now, in this world. It’s two sides of the same manic coin: raw yet polished, disjointed yet cohesive. And it’s her strongest work yet.

Throughout the album, Halsey uses a myriad of experimental production techniques to convey the disarray of her mind. Genres ranging from rap to country to rock mingle with samples from movies and features from Halsey’s friends, rapper SUGA from BTS and Dominic Fike, and idols, Alanis Morrisette.

The first track on the album, titled “Ashley” (Halsey’s real first name), immediately sets a tone we’ve never seen from her before. A quiet, simmering murmur explodes into a guttural chorus with vocal distortion that gives the song a sense of eeriness despite its warm instrumentation. The song ends with a clip of Kate Winslet’s character Clementine, from “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” saying “I’m just a f-cked-up girl looking for my own peace of mind. Don’t assign me yours.” The next track, “clementine,” continues this duality of reserve and rage, with a simple but haunting piano progression with mild percussion backing Halsey’s melodic narration: “In my world I’m constantly, constantly having a breakthrough / or a breakdown, or a blackout.”

“Graveyard” and “You should be sad,” the next two songs on the album, have similar structure to each other but skillfully manage to avoid feeling repetitive. “Graveyard” is laid-back in its tone and melody, but hints at desperation in its lyrics. “You should be sad,” on the other hand, is much more in-your-face and aggressive — a commanding guitar melody and raspy vocals come together to form a sort of dark-country feeling (inspired by Shania Twain), substantiated with the jarring lyrics “You’re not half the man you think that you are / And you can't fill the hole inside of you with money, drugs, and cars.”

The delightfully deceptive “Forever… is a long time” starts off as a fairly bright major chord piano song, but in its last minute, it switches to an urgent and desperate minor key and feels like a world crumbling quickly and irreparably. It’s immediately followed by the bright and cheery “Dominic’s Interlude,” which features Fike, and appears to be a sudden, and purposefully unsuccessful, attempt to redirect the dark tone set up by “You should be sad” and “Forever.”

Despite its abrasive title, “I HATE EVERYBODY” is a twinkling, synthesizer-backed song, in which Halsey grapples with her assertion that it’s easier to hate the people around her than to admit that she wants a connection with them. The next song on the record, “3am,” is arguably the closest Halsey’s ever gotten to producing a traditionally pop-punk song — quick drum beats by Red Hot Chilli Peppers drummer Chad Smith come together with loud guitar riffs, and the electronic-based instrumentation that defines much of her other work is absent. Arguably one of the weaker songs on the record, the smash hit “Without Me” finds its place here, nestled in the middle of all the chaos.The slow and vulnerable “Finally // beautiful stranger” is one of Halsey’s only pure love songs — it’s romantic, sweet, and embraces the idea of kinship in a way she never has before. A familiar sense of conflict presents itself in the lyrics “I’ve never seen a mouth that I would kill to kiss,” but the chorus finds Halsey deciding it’s “finally, finally, finally, finally, finally safe” for her to fall in love.

“Alanis’ Interlude,” a powerful and grungy track about Halsey’s sexuality complete with a throaty chorus from Morrisette and the lyric “Your p-ssy is a wonderland,” is one of the standouts on the album. The longest of Manic’s three interludes, it’s a tight sampling of the genre flexibility Halsey is capable of and the edge she’s been holding back for years. The following track, aptly titled “killing boys,” starts off strong with a sample of the famous dialogue from “Jennifer’s Body,” when Megan Fox’s character says, “I’m not killing people, I’m killing boys.” It’s an apt introduction to a song that has the same tone as the movie — bubbly on the surface, but dark and brooding underneath. It’s about heartbreak motivating revenge, and it hammers in the point with the lyrics “I don’t wanna have to Uma Thurman your ass,” referencing Thurman’s character in another female-led murder movie, “Kill Bill.”

“SUGA’s Interlude” features verses constructed entirely in Korean by rapper Min Yoongi, who performs with the name SUGA, from BTS, the K-Pop group taking the world by storm. It’s the second collaboration between Halsey and the group, their first being the smash hit “Boy With Luv”. Halsey is almost absent on the track, delivering a quiet chorus that breaks up SUGA’s hard and fast verses about navigating a dark world and making the time to search for the light in it.

The most explicitly heart-wrenching track on the album is captivating, and yet listening to it feels like an invasion of privacy. “More” details Halsey’s heartbreak after one of her miscarriages. In the Spotify enhanced album experience, she states that it’s “a love song, but not to a romantic partner. To someone in the universe who doesn’t exist yet.” The lyrics reference her future child’s little feet, clothes in a drawer, and how Halsey has loved the child for all of her life. It’s a devastating track that feels like Halsey is ripping her heart out of her chest and delivering it to us on a silver platter.

The optimistic “Still Learning” provides a glimmer of hope amidst the devastation — Halsey refuses to give up on love and knows that she needs to learn to accept herself first. But the last track on the album, “929,” provides a perfect summary of the tumultuous ride we’ve gone through on the record. A stream of consciousness named after her birthday (she insists on the track with a spoken introduction that it’s also the time she was born, only to realize she was born at 9:26 by the end of the song), it was only recorded once and mimics the feeling of one of her earliest songs, “Is There Somewhere,” off her debut EP, Room 93. Both songs forego the traditional verse-chorus structure in favor of a string of melodies piecing together an internal monologue. “929” takes the captivating energy of the storytelling in “Is There Somewhere” and injects it with a dose of maturity — where once Halsey sang of a lover, she now covers everything from the perils of fame to navigating the meaning of romance to losing a lover to drug abuse. Its desperation is mesmerizing, and its vulnerability blankets her final words with a twinge of hope.

One of the biggest takeaways from Manic is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Halsey’s previous albums have told big cohesive stories, but from a purely musical perspective some tracks feel more impactful and memorable than others. But on Manic, every song feels just as necessary as the next. The shifts in genre and tone from track to track, and even from the beginning to the end of one song, should feel disjointed and unnatural. But somehow, impossibly, Halsey masterfully weaves through the maze she establishes, and the result is something truly grounded in reality — and all its highs and lows.

REVIEWSAfterglow ATXJanuary 21, 2020