Halsey Releases New Album ‘Manic’ – Listen To Her Highly-Anticipated Third LP

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Manic is here, and Halsey fans could not be any more hyped. The 25-year-old singer released her album, the first since 2017’s hopeless fountain kingdom, on Jan. 17, and to say that fans have been ready for it would be an understatement. Boasting 16 tracks – including singles “Clementine,” “Graveyard,” “You Should Be Sad,” and the chart-topping “Without Me” – and appearances by Alanis Morissette, Dominic Fike, and Suga of BTS, Manic may be the first great album of 2020 and the decade.

This new album is “Halsey’s raw autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young mess, craving her share of love and tenderness in a hostile world,” according to Rolling Stone’s review of the album. Yet, Halsey “is a mess who’s a hungrily ambitious artist seeing herself as a mirror for her entire generation.” The album, dubbed “excellent” and earning four-out-of-five stars, is described as a “thrilling quest” as she tries to find peace of mind. While her previous album was a “Romeo and Juliet trip, set in a Shakespearean dystopia,” Rolling Stone says Manic is “about the here-and-now real world and her fight for a place in it as a young woman.”

Halsey (real name Ashley Frangipane) said that the reason Manic would up the way it is was due to “a very, very personal conversation,” Halsey explained during the intimate “Evening With Halsey” event at L.A.’s Grammy Museum in September, per Billboard. “It’s part of the reason I’ve been using a lot of Ashley talk in this album, because it does feel very much like a look behind the curtain in a way. A curtain I never intended to put up but it’s just kind of there, because I was young and scared of showing—I didn’t know who I was deeply so it was irresponsible for me to tell the whole world, ‘This is who I am!’ And the world is like, ‘You’re 21, no it’s not.’ I’m going to be 25 in a couple of days, which is terrifying because I still feel 19.”

“I sat there to make this album and I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to make an angry album,’” she said when speaking to Apple Music’s Beats 1 host Zane Lowe in September 2019.  “And I wasn’t mad. It’s exciting. … I’m closing a chapter in this record that I feel very much like I needed to put the final word on, put the nail in the coffin, if you will. Graveyard, marry it.”

One week ahead of Manic’s release, Halsey paid homage to many of the icons who paved the way for a young woman from Edison, New Jersey to become an international pop star. In the video for “You Should Be Sad,” a country-inspired anthem about heartbreak and moving on, Halsey channels her inner “Dirrty”-era Christina Aguilera, Shania Twain, Carrie Underwood, and the American Horror Story-version of Lady Gaga. It actually is a Gaga reference! But it’s not that one specifically. It’s me referencing Gaga who was referencing Bianca Jagger in AHS Hotel,” she tweeted.