Halsey can be tricky. The tour she opened up in L.A. this week is ostensibly intended to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of her “Badlands” album — and the ostensibly there is not meant to indicate that the artist doesn’t fulfill that stated aim; indeed, she performs that 2015 debut in its entirety. But really, what it comes off feeling like is a full career retrospective, one that just happens to have a serious skew toward one record in particular. She accomplishes this by doing a show that extends to two hours and 25 minutes and includes 30 numbers, so that this might be the show of your Halseyian dreams, regardless of how high in the catalog you place the nostalgia piece at its center. The theme of the show is “Badlands,” but the tenor of the show is just badass.
Worth noting right off the bat is that this is Halsey’s second major tour of the year, and a wildly different one from what preceded it. It was a mere five months ago, in May, that the singer was headlining the Hollywood Bowl, touring behind the 2024 release “The Great Impersonator,” in a very big, theatrical production filled with elaborate production design, dancers, costuming, cinematography and pre-recorded Bono voiceovers. In the second half of that show, after a kind of built-in intermission, she reappeared in a blue wig and minidress and just rocked out for the remainder of the set. It was Halsey nimbly having it both ways: half high-concept showgirl, half scrappy club chick. Well, this new tour — of old material — finds Halsey basically back in the mode of the unpretentious Act II of the “lmpersonator” tour, but writ larger, as in, 145 minutes’ worth of gratifyingly bare-bones stuff.
Not that she isn’t dragging her own staging around this time. At the three shows she did at Hollywood Forever to open the tour, 3D glasses were handed out at the door; their purpose only became apparent near the end, when a three-dimensional floating figure appeared on the big screen behind the stage, Earlier, the screen had been used for artful but not especially elaborate cityscapes and that sort of thing. But no giant champagne-glass props or “Alice in Wonderland” videos for the fall of 2025. For her next trick, Halsey has shrunk the venues, with a persona that seems at least as large in a looser mode.
What she inherently was on her last tours, and most definitely is on this one, is a rock star. Not in the generic sense where those two words get shmushed together to suggest some sort of imperial aura, but actually performing what sounds identifiably like rock music, with kinetic visual moves, sweetness-to-banshee vocal dynamism, keen intelligence and, sure, a healthy surfeit of pure attitude. (It helps, on that last count, that the California transplant hails from New Jersey, which you can lose sight of on record but never when she’s shooting the shit with an audience.) Presented in slimmed-down touring packaging, Halsey seems even more the full package.
“I want to say thank you to Hollywood Forever for letting us do these shows,” Halsey said toward the end of Thursday night’s closer, “because I told them I wanted to do three, and they weren’t sure if we could do three. But now I think everyone’s pretty sure we could have done fucking five.” As you can tell from that quote, there is always some fighting underdog spirit to Halsey, big a star as she is. (Maybe you heard it in the artist’s recent interview with Zane Lowe, where she questioned whether she really is a major star. Grumbling that her new label didn’t think “Great Impersonator” had sold enough to merit a quick followup, Halsey avowed that expectations should be downsized so that she is thought of as part of the class bubbling under the superstar level, not as someone who once did major “Manic” numbers. It was practically a whole treatise on class consciousness in pop, and her own consciousness about where she may fit in, and however everyone else’s perception may differ… but there’s a topic for another time.)
Here’s where things definitely stand: Halsey’s two latest albums, “Great Impersonator” and before it “If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power,” are unquestionably her two best… but by no means are they her two most popular. (I still laugh, thinking of her words to Lowe about how her almost-100,000-unit opening for the most recent record should have been good enough: “Are you fucking kidding me? I made an experimental concept album about how I almost fucking died!”) As a possibly reactionary move to the last album not being considered an unqualified success, it make sense that reverting to a celebration of something that was that would follow — not just with this tour, but a whole line of bonus-filled vinyl and CDs and downloads meant to re-spark the public’s love affair with “Badlands.” Publicity material for the reissues claim that “it is one of the only albums in music history to have every song RIAA-certified gold, platinum or multi-platinum,” so a retrospective tour looks almost fail-safe. But if there was anything mercenary in Halsey’s decision to go retro for a minute, she didn’t let it show.
“I wrote this song in my like childhood bedroom. This is fucking crazy,” she said, introducing the final encore of the evening, characterizing that whole first era’s ethos as a prodigy’s bedroom-pop. And, earlier: “I had no idea that 10 years later it would mean so much to so many fucking people,” they said. “I’ve done a lot of shit wrong in my life, but it feels really, really special for this to be the only thing that I did right on the first fucking try.”
Listening back to “Badlands” now, two impressions may emerge. One is how fully formed Halsey emerged, still 19 when the album was released — in the last few decades of late-teen-pop, you’d be hard-pressed to make a full determination of whether Alanis Morissette or Halsey was the most completely realized artist upon 19-year-old liftoff. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Halsey described the song “Gasoline” as “a mainstay of every set I’ve played ever since… my favorite song to play live.” That track may have been buried deep into the running order of “Badlands,” as a fortuitous last-minute addition, but of course it is the number that is kicking off the “Back to Badlands” tour each night. And its bracing opening verse almost counted as a mission statement for a career of confessional music to come, and the audience that would identify with it all: “Are you insane like me? / Been in pain like me? / Bought a hundred dollar bottle of champagne like me? / Just to pour that motherfucker down the drain like me? / Would you use your water bill to dry the stain like me?” Words to rouse an audience an audience of fellow freshman-aged fans, at the time… and to wake the dead at Hollywood Forever now.
Oh, that other impression of “Badlands,” now: It sounds a little dull, to be honest. Not in the songwriting, which remains razor-sharp and not dated at all, but the slick arrangements, which sound very state-of-the-art-2015 but lack the edge we expect out of even slick pop music in 2025. If you were to isolate any three of the songs from the album, it would be easy to say it was one of the best debuts from that decade, but when you listen to it in toto, part of what stands out is how samey the songs can feel. Halsey had a song on the album called “Colors,” and “Badlands” didn’t have enough of them.
And if that sounds at all harsh, to a Halsey fan… she made it clear at Hollywood Forever that she agrees. At least a little.
“I was 19 years old when I wrote it,” they reminded the crowd early on in Thursday’s show. “I had never played a show before, obviously. So the record is largely mid-tempo songs. I remember going on my first tour [and] getting on stage and coming off and being so devastated, because I was like, ‘Why isn’t the crowd losing their minds and like jumping? They’re loud, they’re singing every word, but I want them moving their bodies and fucking losing it!’ My manager, Anthony [Li], said, ‘The album’s like 100 bpms [beats per minute]. It’s the most fucking chill.’ … I learned a lot in that moment. But I’m grateful for it now, because we’re all old, so there’s something kind of nice about having an album full of songs that are a little bit more laid back, right? Which means, naturally, this should be a pretty chill show.”
That last bit was a joke, of course. Thursday’s show was nothing if not well-paced, with just the right amount of last-reel-of-“One-Battle-After-Another” dips and rises. That of course had a lot to do with the 15 out of 30 songs that weren’t from “Badlands,” but it also had plenty to do with how energized the debut cuts that have remained mainstays have become through 10 years’ worth of performances. She’s said that she would like to think about recutting the “Badlands” songs someday, and based on how well they fit in amid the pop-punk-leaning parts of the set now, it wouldn’t be an uninteresting prospect.
One of the things that worked so nicely about these tour-opening shows is that the concerts felt like greatest-hits sets, but actually weren’t, at least in terms of completely reiterating surefire tour staples of the past. Of course, she was all but contractually obligated to play all of the songs from the first edition of “Badlands” and a few besides, so the hardcore fans could count on hearing deeper cuts like “Garden,” which showed only one previous performance on setlists.fm before this week, or “Coming Down,” which only had 25 known priors… versus the 296 registered for “Gasoline.” But even when it came to which tracks to play from the two most recent albums, there were unexpected picks. “If I Can’t Have Love…” was represented by, among other tunes, “Bells in Santa Fe,” which she performed only about a half-dozen times on the tour behind that album, and “People Disappear Here,” which Halsey had never done live until premiering it at the “Impersonator” tour-closing show at the Yaamava’ resort in July. Would you believe it if we said that it turns out “People Disappear Here” is actually one of her best songs, as well as her rarest? Probably everyone who was at Hollywood Forever this past week would.
“People Disappear Here” is a gorgeously melodramatic twin to “Lonely Is the Muse,” the one number from “The Great Impersonator” that it’s easy to imagine Halsey might perform at every foreseeable show from here on out. It’s her show-stopper, and the artist found an especially effective way of staging it at Hollywood Forever, first appearing as a black silhouette draped over a white screen before finally walking down to the main stage and bringing herself into the light in living color. (Which, in this case, was blue garters to go with the blue wig.) “Muse” probably isn’t as autobiographical as some of her other songs; at least, given her chutzpah since her teen years, it’s difficult to imagine there ever was a time when she felt like her role was to be an inspiration to a Svengali, versus possessing eternal leading-character energy. But she sure empathizes with that type of woman, to the point that she wrote a great feminist anthem on their sad behalf. By the time she’s down on her knees and screaming about being a use-once-and-discard lover, it’s clear “Lonely Is the Muse” is one of the great rock songs of the last decade. (And if it doesn’t at least get nominated for a rock Grammy, we will know something is seriously wrong.)
She gives great guitar-ruled rage in “Muse.” She also gave great synthesizer-fed slinkiness late in the show, with her cover of Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line,” which dates back to the “Badlands” era (a studio version is included in a deluxe version), although she said it was only the second time she’d ever performed it live, on Thursday night. That kind of rarity was welcome, although some in the crowd were unhappy that it won out when Halsey took a voice vote, offering that versus a chance to hear the equally rare “Tokyo Narita,” which had been played the previous two nights, in a Sophie’s choice sort of situation.
Halsey noted she had an extra motivation to make these L.A. gigs particularly good shows. “There aren’t very many shows that get to take place here. It’s an absolute honor that I was included in the shows that take place in this environment… Because we are in Hollywood Forever cemetery, I want to take a moment to acknowledge all of the people resting here who are letting us use this as our playground tonight. It’s my favorite type of audience, because they can’t go anywhere. Hope I give them the best show that they’ve seen, ever.
“I just think about the concept of the afterlife. Me going to, ideally, heaven, right? I don’t know — there’s always the other place — but getting there and someone who’s been dead for so long being like, ‘I saw you play live.’ And I’m like, ‘You did? That’s so awesome. When did you die?’ They’re like, ‘1924’ … A spooky, spooky energy afoot. I love it.”
But her best dedication was reserved for the living. Beyond thanking her doctors and nurses (in case anyone hadn’t heard, she’s had a rough road), Halsey said she wanted to thank “one person in particular who I never get the chance to thank properly. She’s probably already gone right now, but I wanna say thank you to my nanny, Rachel, knowing that someone takes such good care of my son and that he is so loved and cared for, so that I can get up here and do this for you.” From deathcore to momcore — the nostalgic teen angst of “Badlands” suddenly seemed much further away, but only for a moment.
Setlist for Halsey at Hollywood Forever, Oct. 16, 2025:
Gasoline
Castle
Control
Bells in Santa Fe
Drive
Coming Down
You Should Be Sad
The Lighthouse
Strange Love
Haunting
New Americana
Hurricane
Dog Years
Nightmae
Hold Me Down
Garden
Ghost
Roman Holiday
Closer
Ego
Colors
Ashley
People Disappear Here
Without Me
Lonely Is the Muse
Young God
(encore)
Trouble (solo acoustic)
I Walk the Line
Bad at Love
Is There Somewhere
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