Halsey (singer)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Halsey, the stage name of Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, once looked at a bank account holding nine dollars. She spent it on a four-pack of Red Bull. The caffeine kept her awake for two or three days, because she judged sleeping somewhere random to be more dangerous than going without sleep.

  Years later, Time placed the same woman on its list of the 100 most influential people in the world for 2020. By then her albums had sold over one million combined units and drawn more than six billion streams in the United States. She had also become involved in suicide prevention awareness, advocacy for survivors of sexual assault, and racial justice protests.

  How does a teenager who lived in basements and shelters end up on that list? Why does her stage name come from a Brooklyn subway station? What happened when she wanted to release a song and her record label said wait? And why has she been so open about the illnesses that shaped her career?

  3182019

• 2. Jersey Childhood

  ›

  Edison, New Jersey, is where Ashley Frangipane was born on the 29th of September 1994, to Nicole and Chris Frangipane. Her parents had dropped out of college after her mother discovered she was pregnant. Her mother went on to work as an emergency medical technician, and her father managed a car dealership. Her mother has Italian and Hungarian ancestry, while her father is African American with some small Irish ancestry. Two younger brothers, Sevian and Dante, rounded out the household.

  Money was tight, and the family moved often as her parents worked many jobs. By the time she was a teenager she had enrolled in six schools. She was raised Catholic.

  Strings came first for her. She played violin, viola and cello, and at 14 she took up the guitar. Her childhood listening included Alanis Morissette, Justin Bieber and Brand New.

  School itself was harder than home. Classmates bullied her, and at 17 she attempted suicide. The attempt led to a 17-day stay in a psychiatric hospital, where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, the same condition her mother has. Drug use began soon afterward, and she has said the disorder made her an "unconventional child".

  In 2012 she graduated from Warren Hills Regional High School in Washington, New Jersey.

  318121314

• 3. Street Name, Street Life

  ›

  Halsey Street station, on the New York City Subway in Brooklyn, gave the singer her professional name. At 17 she was involved with a man of 24 who lived near it, and she spent a lot of time in the area. She said it was where she first started writing music and felt part of "something bigger than my town in middle of nowhere New Jersey". She called Halsey "a manifestation of all the exaggerated parts of me", an alter ego. The name is also an anagram of Ashley. She tried several stage names at acoustic shows in different cities, and Halsey was simply the most popular.

  The Rhode Island School of Design came next, but financial hardship forced her to withdraw. She attended community college instead and eventually dropped out of that too. Her parents, who "just didn't agree with a lot of things about her", then kicked her out.

  A basement in Lower Manhattan became her home. She shared it with a group she called "degenerate stoners", people she knew through her then-boyfriend. When she was not there she occasionally stayed in one of New York's many homeless shelters, and sometimes with her maternal grandmother. She also considered prostitution as a way to make money.

  Poems she had written for years pushed her toward more serious songwriting. Music became her "confessional approach" and a form of therapy after the difficult life she had endured.

  318201219

• 4. Online First

  ›

  Under the username se7enteenblack, Frangipane began posting videos in 2012 on YouTube, Kik and above all Tumblr. She had started writing music at 17. Her first notable piece was a parody of Taylor Swift's "I Knew You Were Trouble", inspired by Swift's relationship with Harry Styles. A follow-up song about the same relationship appeared online in early 2013.

  A party in early 2014 changed her direction. A "music guy" there liked her voice and asked her to collaborate on a song. The result was "Ghost", a song about her ex-boyfriend. She posted it on SoundCloud several weeks after it was recorded. Within hours it was popular, and several record labels got in touch. The song eventually charted and reached radio.

  She picked Astralwerks because it offered more creative freedom than the other labels that called. In August 2014 she began touring with The Kooks, performing original songs. Her debut extended play, Room 93, followed on the 27th of October 2014. It charted in the lower regions of the Billboard 200 and reached number three on the Top Heatseekers chart.

  At South by Southwest in 2015 she played songs from her first album and became the most tweeted-about performer of the night.

  2229252631

• 5. Albums and Hits

  ›

  Badlands arrived on the 28th of August 2015, and she had written every song on it at 19. She described it as a concept album set in a dystopian future society called The Badlands, a metaphor for her mental state at the time. Producers included her then-boyfriend, the Norwegian producer Lido. Halsey herself said it lacked a proper radio hit. Joe Levy of Rolling Stone called her a "new Tumblr popstar with a knack for sticky imagery".

  The album debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 with 115,000 copies sold in its first week, 97,000 of them pure album sales. It later earned a double platinum certification for 2,000,000 US units. "New Americana" reached number 60 on the Hot 100. "Gasoline" was never a single, yet it grew into one of the album's most popular tracks.

  In July 2016 the Chainsmokers released "Closer", with Halsey singing and cowriting. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 12 consecutive weeks and led the charts of 12 other countries. It sold more than 15 million units worldwide and earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance.

  Hopeless Fountain Kingdom came out on the 2nd of June 2017. She wanted to prove she was "more than capable" of radio-ready music, so the sound turned more radio friendly. It was another concept album, this time a tale of two lovers based on Romeo and Juliet. The breakup with Lido inspired it, and it also centers on her bisexuality and on bisexual characters. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 106,000 units, making her the first woman with a number one album in the US in 2017. Its single "Bad at Love" peaked at number five.

  "Eastside", with Benny Blanco and Khalid, arrived in July 2018 and peaked at number nine on the Hot 100. It also topped the charts in five other countries.

  An October 2018 single, "Without Me", became her first solo number one, after she moved up to Capitol Records. It held the top spot for two non-consecutive weeks and stayed in the top five for 22 weeks. The US certified it nine times platinum. Its video featured a "G-Eazy lookalike" after her second breakup with the rapper. The hit made her the eighth woman to score multiple number ones in the 2010s.

  In April 2019 her song "Boy with Luv" with the Korean group BTS set a record for the most-viewed music video in its first 24 hours on YouTube, at 74.6 million views. Manic followed on the 17th of January 2020 and became her best-selling album worldwide.

  In February 2019 she both hosted and performed on Saturday Night Live. Her performance was praised, and the show's ratings rose with a younger audience.

  3638399858

• 6. Influences and Style

  ›

  At home, her mother played the Cure and Nirvana, while her father favored the Notorious B.I.G., Slick Rick, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony and Tupac Shakur. Halsey says both sets of tastes shaped her.

  Dolores O'Riordan of the Cranberries held a special place. Halsey listened to the band with her mother, and said, "Dolores O'Riordan was a massive influence for me." She learned from O'Riordan how to sing with emotion and an unconventional voice, even without classical training.

  Matty Healy's descriptive, dialogue-heavy lyrics also left a mark. She credits Panic! at the Disco with changing her life and Lady Gaga with giving her the strength to be herself. Her online life began as a One Direction fan. Brand New mattered so much that she once changed her Instagram biography to "The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me", a reference to the band's third album. Taylor Swift is the reason she insists on writing her own music, and while touring for the tenth anniversary of Badlands she named Ellie Goulding as an early idol.

  Cinema shaped her most of all. "There's plenty of musicians that I love and respect, but I think that I'm the most inspired by cinema," she has said. Quentin Tarantino, Harmony Korine and Larry Clark are on her list. For the stage, Adam Lazzara of Taking Back Sunday showed her how to use a microphone as a prop.

  Her singing is often called "indie", and she uses an accent different from her speaking voice. Jon Caramanica of The New York Times placed her among a wave of female pop rebels who followed Lorde. Billboard described the Badlands vision as combining "the synthy darkness of Lorde, the neon-pop chutzpah of Miley Cyrus and the flickering film noir of Lana Del Rey". Her songs draw on personal experience and storytelling, including relationships with other women.

  In 2019 she called herself "the anti-popstar". She argues she is filed under pop mainly because she is a woman.

  19668330

• 7. Label Fight and Reinvention

  ›

  If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power appeared on the 27th of August 2021 with little prior promotion. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails produced it, and she moved to a darker industrial sound. A companion film played at select IMAX theaters before reaching HBO Max on the 7th of October. Critics were warm. The album debuted at number two and later went Gold, but with no big hit single it left the charts sooner than her earlier albums.

  In January 2022 she wrote and produced "So Good". Capitol held it back because the label wanted to test its virality. On the 22nd of May 2022, Halsey posted a TikTok video criticizing Capitol for refusing release without a campaign built for going viral. Five days earlier she had played a snippet of the song on TikTok without approval.

  People wondered whether Capitol would sue. The music industry attorney Erin M. Jacobson told TIME, "it is rare that a label would sue one of its own artists, especially when the label plans to continue working with that artist." Capitol gave in on the 31st of May 2022 and set the song's release for the 9th of June 2022. Some suspected a marketing stunt, but Halsey said it was not fake. News outlets used the episode to discuss labels pressuring musicians for TikTok virality.

  Variety announced on the 15th of April 2023 that Halsey and Capitol had parted ways. On the 14th of June 2023 she signed with Columbia Records. Within days she played two string ensemble shows at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, performing orchestral versions of her songs. Three more orchestra dates followed, in Hollywood, Florida; Gary, Indiana; and Wheatland, California.

  The Great Impersonator, her fifth studio album, came out on the 25th of October 2024. It deals with her health battles. Its lead single "Lucky" samples Britney Spears' 2000 single of the same name. For the single "Ego", she wrote and directed the video and played two characters who try to kill each other. At the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards she assembled her ideal "90s garage rock band" with Victoria De Angelis on bass, Jazzelle Zanaughtti on synths and Maya Stepansky on drums. To reveal the album's covers, she hid clues and capsules holding items from different decades around major cities for fans to find.

  On the 28th of August 2025 she announced the Back to Badlands Tour, 22 shows across North America, Europe and Australia running from October 2025 through February 2026. It celebrated a decade since her debut album, which got a special anniversary edition the next day.

  She also took a producing role on the comedy-drama Our Hero, Balthazar, which stars her fiancé, Avan Jogia. The film premiered on the 8th of June 2025 and was redistributed by Picturehouse and WG in March 2026.

  899071214

• 8. Speaking Out

  ›

  More than 200,000 protesters heard Halsey at the 2018 Women's March, but she did not give a traditional speech. She performed a five-minute poem, "A Story Like Mine", built from personal accounts of sexual assault and violence. It included taking her best friend to Planned Parenthood after a rape, and women assaulted by the Olympic physician Larry Nassar. She closed by asking survivors, "Black, Asian, poor, wealthy, trans, cis, Muslim, Christian", to listen to and support each other. CNN's AJ Willingham ran the headline "Halsey's Women's March speech moved people around the world." After the 2017 march she had tweeted a promise to give one dollar to Planned Parenthood for every retweet, and she ended up donating $100,000.

  Her causes ran wide. She backed Bernie Sanders in both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns, and joined 26 other artists on the charity single "Hands" for victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting in July 2016. On the 10th of September 2017 she took part in the "I'm Listening" suicide prevention awareness broadcast. In 2018 she protested at March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C. Later that year she criticized Victoria's Secret for excluding transgender models, saying, "as a member of the LGBT+ community, I have no tolerance for a lack of inclusivity. Especially not motivated by stereotype." In 2020 she joined racial justice protests in Los Angeles with Yungblud, then launched The Black Creators Fund in June.

  Her body became a public subject too. In 2016 she went public on Twitter about her endometriosis diagnosis. A miscarriage in 2015 had occurred, and she went on stage hours after realizing it because she did not want to hurt her career. At the Blossom Ball, run by the Endometriosis Foundation of America, she said, "Sometimes I'm bloated, I'm on an IV, I'm sick, I'm on medicine, and I'm backstage, terrified that I'm going to bleed through my clothes in the middle of my show." She spoke because the media often showed her as perfectly healthy.

  The list kept growing. On the 11th of December 2021 she told fans on Twitter that she had been diagnosed with ADHD in high school and was now medicated for it. She has also been diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, Sjögren syndrome, mast cell activation syndrome and POTS. On the 5th of June 2024 she disclosed lupus and a T cell disorder. Singing and performing help her manage bipolar symptoms, and she embraces the condition because it makes her "really empathetic".

  In July 2021 her son was born. By April 2023 she had filed for primary physical custody so that she could take him on tour with her.

  531014154