Halsey
Ashley Nicolette Frangipane grew up in New Jersey, absorbing her mother's alt-rock and her father's hip-hop before posting confessional songs online and reinventing herself as Halsey, an anagram of her adopted first name. She broke through in 2015 with the moody concept album 'Badlands,' pairing diaristic, first-person writing with a dark, synth-forward alt-pop sound, and became one of the defining pop voices of the 2010s across hits like 'New Americana,' 'Without Me,' and 'Bad at Love.' Her work threads together emo candor, electropop sheen, and industrial-tinged production into an unusually genre-fluid mainstream pop.
Halsey has called herself a longtime fan of Nine Inch Nails, telling Trent Reznor in a letter that she had 'been plagiarising you guys for years' and that she wanted the unsettling, cinematic production Reznor and Atticus Ross are known for; the pair went on to produce her 2021 album, but that industrial-electronic texture surfaces in her music well before then.
listen forPlay NIN's 'Closer' against Halsey's 'Nightmare' — hear the same grinding, machine-driven low end and the way a distorted, insistent groove is built to feel menacing rather than merely danceable.
Halsey has named the Long Island emo band Brand New as a favorite and formative influence, at one point setting her Instagram bio to 'The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me' after their third album; that scene's diaristic, self-lacerating songwriting is a template for the raw first-person confession running through her early work.
listen forThrow on Brand New's 'Sic Transit Gloria... Glory Fades' and then Halsey's 'Control' — both ride a tense, quiet-to-loud build and turn a churning inner monologue into the hook, the narrator narrating their own unraveling.
Halsey has cited Lana Del Rey among her influences, and critics have repeatedly placed her cinematic, melancholic alt-pop in Del Rey's lineage; you can hear it in the slow, film-noir mood and the wounded, breathy delivery of Halsey's earliest songs.
listen forSet Del Rey's 'Video Games' next to Halsey's 'Is There Somewhere' — both drift on a hushed, downcast melody and a torch-song sense of doomed romance, the vocal sitting low and close as if half-whispered.