‘The Great Impersonator (Deluxe)’ review: Halsey’s encore

Does a story die with its narrator? When Halsey wrote that, in 2023, she had real reason to wonder. She had been diagnosed with lupus and a T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder. She had a toddler. Had just been dropped by Capitol after making the best album of her career and watching it underperform. She wrote The Great Impersonator believing it might be the last thing she’d ever say as an artist. That’s the album that came out in 2024. The deluxe edition arrived this morning — eighteen months later, seven extra tracks long, with Halsey alive enough to mount an anniversary tour for Badlands and headline a Czech rock festival in June.

So the deluxe lands inside a question the original couldn’t ask. What happens when you survive the thing you wrote your survival album about?

A confession that didn’t quite land the first time.

The original Impersonator received what we might charitably call a respectful reception. Metacritic settled it at 79. Variety used the phrase “two concept albums in one.” Rolling Stone and the AV Club admired it. Pitchfork and Anthony Fantano went after it with some heat, the latter retreating to the always-suspicious shorthand of “main character syndrome.” In fact, the Pitchfork review accused her martyrdom of feeling “self-ascribed.” Which — and let’s be honest here — is what every confessional record by every female artist gets accused of, from Joni to Tori to Fiona to Mitski, every single time, forever, world without end.

The thing critics keep getting tangled in, and that listeners keep relitigating in Tumblr reblogs and the AOTY comments, is that Halsey-the-personality has gotten in the way of Halsey-the-musician for a decade now. She overshares. She picks fights. Has aesthetic miscalculations on rollout (the IICHLIWP cover; the pregnancy reveal; the Britney video). She announces her serious illness by releasing an acoustic ballad. She is, to use a phrase her detractors love, a lot.

The trouble with the Halsey character.

I want to suggest that this is the actual subject of The Great Impersonator, and the deluxe edition makes it harder to pretend otherwise. The album’s structuring conceit — Halsey as Marilyn, as Stevie, as Joni, as Aaliyah, as Britney, as her own younger self — looks at first like a marketing gimmick.

It’s essentially 18 days of Instagram costumes. But look closer and it’s a thesis. Every female artist eventually becomes an impersonation of herself.

Marilyn knew that. Britney knew that. Halsey, writing from inside an autoimmune flare while her label decided whether to keep her, certainly knew it. The “main character syndrome” critique cracks open into something much sadder once you realize the whole album is about how the main-character role is the only one she gets cast in. And she’s not sure she wants it anymore.

The original 18.

One thing nobody quite said about The Great Impersonator in the first round of reviews is that it isn’t sequenced like a pop album. It’s sequenced like a Catholic wake. Long. Repetitive. Mortality-saturated. Designed to wear you down rather than light you up. “Only Living Girl in LA” opens at six minutes because it has to. Anything shorter would make the album feel like a pop record auditioning for prestige, instead of a prestige record auditioning for survival.

The first major arc, from “Ego” through “The End,” is an illness panel: five tracks that move from self-loathing into mortality with “Dog Years” and “The End” as twin emotional summits. “I’m one hundred ninety-six in dog years, I have seen enough, I’ve seen it all.” The Fiona-Apple sneer she puts on the line lands because she earns it.

The middle of the record is the section everyone — fans included — gets quiet about. “I Believe in Magic,” “Letter to God (1983),” and “Hometown” form a stripped-acoustic memorial panel. And the consensus complaint is that they all sound the same. Which is true. Which is the point. Grief tends to sounds the same. Three songs about the people you’ve outlived will, ultimately, repeat themselves, because so does mourning. The complaint that the section “drags” is essentially a complaint that the album refuses to entertain you through its dead. I find that stubbornness moving. And I understand if you don’t.

“Lonely Is the Muse” rethought.

The album’s centerpiece, and the song that gets sharper every time I hear it, is “Lonely Is the Muse.” Read at release, it scanned as the latest entry in Halsey’s long-running ex-boyfriends ledger — Yungblud, G-Eazy, Evan Peters, Alev Aydin, take your pick. Read now, with the knowledge that Capitol dropped her after IICHLIWP and Columbia signed her to make this record, the song sounds like something else entirely.

“I spent years becoming cool, and in one single second, you can make a decade of my efforts disappear.” That’s a song about a label. For some reason, people keep thinking it’s about a man.

“I always knew I was a martyr, and that Jesus was one too, but I was built from special pieces that I learned how to unscrew, and I can always reassemble to fit perfectly for you, or anybody that decides that I’m of use.” That is, line for line, one of the most honest things any major-label pop star has written about being a major-label pop star this decade. Reframe the whole album that way and the impersonations stop being costumes and start being a job description.

The closing run.

The final stretch — “Lucky,” “Letter to God (1998),” the title track — is where the deluxe complicates what we thought we knew. “Lucky,” heard as a single in summer 2024, registered as a Britney-karaoke gimmick. Heard now, sequenced after seventeen tracks of mortality, the bridge breaks me a little.

“I shaved my head four times because I wanted to, and then I did it one more time ’cause I got sick, and I thought I changed so much, nobody would notice it, and no one did.” That is a sentence about being a body the public watches. It functions whether the body in question is Britney’s or Halsey’s, and the song is finally about how it doesn’t matter which woman you’re looking at. Because the apparatus does the same thing to all of them.

“Letter to God (1998)” features her son Ender’s babbling, which would be cloying in any other context, and instead lands as the album’s emotional knife. It’s a mother begging God to let her stay alive long enough for her child to remember her. The Björk-shaped title-track close earns its curtain call because everything before it has been an actual show.

What the deluxe adds, and what it changes.

Which brings us to the seven new songs, and why they matter. The deluxe-edition reflex in 2026 is cynical, sure. Drop a few extras, refresh the streaming numbers, reset the news cycle. Thankfully, The Great Impersonator (Deluxe) doesn’t quite work that way. The new tracks live on a separate disc. And they read less like B-sides than like a parallel commentary track.

“Lucid” debuted on the For My Last Trick tour last June, introduced from the stage as a song about you. Meaning the audience, meaning the people who’d shown up to watch her not be dead. It’s a love letter dressed up as a drug song, all Alice in Wonderland pills and a girl named Sarah who doesn’t like it when the people go away.

The trick of it is the chorus, which sounds at first like the singer asking herself the question: are you lucid, are you somewhere you should be? And it resolves, by the end, into the singer asking it of the room. “Will you remember me?” It’s the most exposed Halsey has ever sounded onstage, which is saying something.

The title track of the original album asked does a story die with its narrator, a question phrased rhetorically because she didn’t actually want the answer. “Lucid” stops pretending the question is rhetorical. It puts the answer in the audience’s mouth. Yes, no, maybe. Depending on how high they are and how much they were paying attention.

Rounding out the disc.

“Carry the Weight” turns outward. “you won’t decide when it’s finished, no, you don’t get to take that from me.” It’s a kiss-off to someone still narrating her life back to her with the wrong adjectives, and the rare Halsey breakup song where she sounds genuinely done rather than performatively done.

“Lessons” turns inward to the opposite problem. “All of my history plays out in front of me, like they’re the reruns on the screen, all the same mistakes, fuckin’ up every take, and I’m the same in every scene.” Read together, the two tracks bracket the album’s central anxiety from both sides. The version of you that other people keep writing and the version you keep writing yourself. And the impossibility of either one being the real thing.

“Afraid of the Dark (Demo)” is the deluxe’s most generous gesture. It’s a song about a parasocial fan relationship, written from inside one. “Are you afraid of the dark? I am if you are. I’m whatever you are, you are.” The line operates as a thesis statement for her entire career. Halsey has always been an artist who reflects her listener back at them. Sometimes flatteringly. Sometimes not. Saying it out loud is the deluxe’s weirdest gift.

“Alice of the Upper Class” and the imposter problem.

“Alice of the Upper Class,” originally a Y2K-era exclusive from the limited digital release, returns here with sharper purpose. It deepens the album’s central metaphor in a way the original sequence sort of fudged. “I’m a freak, yeah, I’m a psycho, I feel so good when I am hypomanic.” The song is the one moment on the whole project where the bipolar-disorder content sits front-and-center rather than getting subsumed into the lupus-and-cancer narrative.

The chorus delivers the album’s plainest message: “Can’t you see that I’m an imposter?” The original album needed this song. The deluxe is, in part, a chance to correct that.

“Nothing!” and “Charades” round out disc two, and they’re slighter than the rest. The former is a torch song about wanting everyone and everything. The latter is a ’70s-aesthetic exclusive she released back in October 2024, a song about feeling too exhausted to keep performing okayness.

“Are you good at charades? Can you see that I’m bleeding on the stage?” That line makes the whole project’s title pretty easy to process. The Great Impersonator isn’t a record about pretending to be other people like many assumed. It’s a record about pretending to be fine.

Where The Great Impersonator (Deluxe) leaves Halsey.

The deluxe of The Great Impersonator is a more complete and more honest version of an album that was, even in its incomplete form, the most ambitious work of one of the most commercially successful and critically underregarded pop careers of the last decade.

Halsey has, in a quiet way, outlasted nearly every artist who broke through alongside her in 2015. She is, by any measurable metric, still here. She boasts five top-two albums in a row, two diamond singles, a sold-out tour, a thirtieth birthday, a son who knows her voice. And by the metric that matters most to her, she’s still trying to figure out whether she can make the version of herself the apparatus needs. Make the version she actually is coexist inside one survivable life.

The deluxe never directly answers that  It just keeps the question open another 18 months. Does a story die with its narrator? Halsey is still alive to ask. The deluxe is the punctuation mark on a sentence she didn’t expect to finish. The fact that she finished it should be enough for many. But I suspect it will keep not being enough, for her, for a while yet. And that’s what will keep being the engine of the music.

Maybe the next album will be its own kind of answer to this one. And we’ll all be here to hear it. Hopefully. That is, when you think about it, the only ending a record like this could possibly call a lasting success.

The Great Impersonator (Deluxe) is available now.

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Images courtesy of Columbia Records.