'Manic' review: Halsey’s most honest release yet
By Rachel T
The release of Halsey’s third album, ‘Manic’ this January was hotly anticipated, following the success of her first two albums ‘hopeless fountain kingdom’ and ‘BADLANDS’. However, it fell prey to an unfortunate yet common occurrence within the music industry: all of the album’s best songs were released as singles in the months leading up to the album. The high quality of these singles built up our expectations for ‘Manic’ which made the full album’s actual release somewhat anticlimactic. The album, whilst very enjoyable, did not quite live up to the hype.
Nevertheless, ‘Manic’ is beautiful and triumphant in many ways – professing to be Halsey’s most honest release yet, she does not shy away from the sometimes harsh realities of navigating fame, identity, womanhood, sexuality, heartbreak, and all kinds of love (romantic, familial and self).
Track Breakdown
(Four high and low points off of the 16-track album):
“I’d like to tell you that my sky’s not blue it’s violent rain”
‘clementine’
Perhaps Halsey’s most original (and, in our opinion, best) song yet, ‘clementine’ is confessional, raw and honest. The calm, lullaby-like quality of the song works well in contrast to its manic (see what we did there?) and somewhat violent themes. The contrast between the music and lyrics of ‘clementine’ is captured in the song’s first line: “I’d like to tell you that my sky’s not blue it’s violent rain.” Halsey is telling us that, whilst this song may sound like blue skies, it contains a storm.
‘you should be sad’
This song is an exception to the rule that we outlined above – released as a single just a few weeks before ‘Manic’, ‘you should be sad’ is arguably the weakest song on the album. It cannot be denied that ‘you should be sad’ is catchy and it is interesting to hear Halsey make her first foray into country music. However, the lyrics fall somewhat flat. Halsey may be trying to achieve power through simplicity in the line “I’m so glad I never ever had a baby with you” but, in our opinion, these lyrics feel unimaginative when compared with the rich lyrical imagery present in much of the rest of the album.
Halsey by DeShaun Craddock via Flickr
‘More’
Halsey revealed in an interview with Zane Lowe that ‘More’ is about her “struggles with reproductive health”. ‘More’ is a hopeful yet heart-breaking lullaby to Halsey’s future children which explores the nature of womanhood, and is one of the songs on the album in which Halsey’s emotional vulnerability is most keenly felt.
‘929’
This song nicely rounds off the album, summing up many of the ideas explored throughout – the song opens with perhaps the album’s central question “well, who am I?”. It examines both sides of Halsey’s self-discovery: growth (“I wasn’t in love then and I’m still not now / and I’m so happy I figured that out”) and self-loathing (“I can’t believe I still feed my fucking temptation / and I’m still looking for my salvation”).
The song is also bookended by sound bites, a device which is used to interesting effect throughout the album and which brings ‘Manic’ to the brink of almost creating its own genre of music. In the case of ‘929’, the song begins with a sound bite of Halsey insisting she was born at 9:29am on 9/29 (September 29th to anyone not from America!) and ends with her confessing that she’s a liar – she has discovered that she was born at 9:26am. The last we hear from Halsey on the album is her not taking herself too seriously – she giggles as she admits that she didn’t know the details of her own life as well as she thought she did. These sound bites hint that her journey of self-discovery will continue past this album and perhaps find its way onto her next.
P.S. shout out to ‘Nightmare’, an absolute feminist banger which Halsey released in May 2019 but never made it onto the album….