She’s half-black/half-white, openly bisexual (two cuts of the steamy “Ghost” video alternately pair her with a man and a woman) and struggles with bipolar disorder, which she says made her an “unconventional child” who grew up to be an “inconvenient woman.” In between, she lived a precocious, wildly bohemian lifestyle. “I’m used to packing up and leaving, to condensing myself into a digestible version because people don’t have much time to get to know me.”īut Halsey doesn’t fit neatly into a box. She has two brothers, and attended six schools by the time she was a teen.
“We moved wherever the jobs or cheap apartments were,” she recalls. Halsey grew up all over New Jersey, raised by parents younger than she is now when they had her. On her forearm, one of Halsey’s many tattoos reads, “These violent delights have violent ends.” It’s a line from Romeo and Juliet that reminds her to keep the vices in check. But all that escapist fantasy is fed by gritty reality. On Badlands, Halsey’s larger-than-life vision combines the synthy darkness of Lorde, the neon-pop chutzpah of Miley Cyrus and the flickering film noir of Lana Del Rey. “She’s entirely driven by her vision,” says Zane Lowe, DJ-programmer at Apple Music’s Beats 1, where “New Americana” was the second-most-played song in July after The Weeknd‘s “Can’t Feel My Face.” “You meet people who want to make art, and then you meet people who have to do it because if they don’t, they’ll go crazy.”įirefly 2015: Halsey Explains Why She Wants to Leak Her Own Album (“It seems like a real place if you forget all the aliens,” she says.) 28 release on Astralwerks/Capitol Records, Halsey’s full-length debut, Badlands - which could land in the upper reaches of the Billboard 200 with more than 75,000 equivalent-album units its first week, industry forecasters suggest - is a dystopian concept album inspired by hedonistic hubs like Las Vegas and, curiously, Star Wars planet Tatooine.
“I’m 20, but I feel 40,” says Halsey, sporting pink shades and a baseball hat that reads, “I have to get rich…We’re all gonna die.” “Kids I grew up with are going off to college, having threesomes in bathrooms and ‘vaping’ beer, but I went through my sex, drugs, loss and existential confusion phase at 17.” Steve Aoki, Halsey, Raury & More Give Sage Advice to Their College-Age Selves