Halsey
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- Edited: Feb 27, 2020 - 03:45AM
Halsey Biography
Halsey is the stage name of New Jersey native Ashley Nicolette Frangipane. It is an anagram of her first name and reference to the Halsey Street subway stop and street in Brooklyn where she used to live. On her website, Halsey’s bio reads: “I am Halsey. I will never be anything but honest. I write songs about sex and being sad.”
With over 14,000 friends on MySpace as a tween, she began posting covers of songs on YouTube. In 2012, she posted “The Haylor Song”, a parody of Taylor Swift’s hit song “I Knew You Were Trouble” that created controversy over the nature of the lyrics. Nevertheless, she had accumulated a respectable amount of online attention, reaching 16,000 subscribers on YouTube at the age of 18.
Halsey posted her first single “Ghost” on Soundcloud in 2014, which turned heads in her direction. Her close friend Anthony pretended to be her manager, accompanying her in various meetings with different record labels. After being signed to Astralwerks, she released her EP Room 93 in late 2014, with four of the five tracks carrying accompanying music videos, giving the EP a “visual” feel. She was the most mentioned artist online at SXSW 2015, which was evident by her ever-increasing fanbase. She reached over half a million followers on Twitter at the age of 20.
In anticipation of her debut effort, Badlands, “Hold Me Down” was released as a pre-order single, followed by “New Americana”, the anthem of today’s diversified generation. Badlands was officially released on August 28th, 2015, described by Halsey as “an angry female record”. It also represents her mental state. At Firefly Music Festival 2015, she told an interviewer, “For me, it was about creating a universe and making it so that people felt like they were actually being transported somewhere.”
Halsey and Justin Bieber got together on the Skrillex-produced track “The Feeling”, which they performed together on the TODAY Show in promotion for Bieber’s fourth album Purpose. In 2016, she collaborated The Chainsmokers on the song of the summer, “Closer”, her biggest hit to date. The Grammy-nominated earworm maintained its reign at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for 12 consecutive weeks. Halsey later dropped “Not Afraid Anymore” for the Fifty Shades Darker soundtrack.
In 2017, Halsey officially announced her sophomore album, hopeless fountain kingdom. Released on June 2nd, 2017, the record’s title fulfills the long-debated acronym “hfk” that Halsey has continuously hinted throughout the years. The album is inspired by the story of Romeo + Juliet. That same year, Halsey and then-boyfriend G-Eazy released “Him & I”
Halsey’s first track of 2018 was a feature on Thirty Seconds to Mars' “Love Is Madness.” Collaborative track “Eastside” saw her combining forces with Khalid and benny blanco. Following this, Halsey released her first single from her unannounced 2020 album, titled “Without Me”. Following this release, Halsey and G-Eazy ended their on-again off-again relationship.
After a remix of “Without Me” by Juice WRLD was dropped, Halsey’s 2019 began with a collaboration with English rocker YUNGBLUD titled “11 Minutes,” The pair confirmed they were dating not long after. The duo went on to sing a cover of Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You into the Dark” for triple J.
After years of friendship, Korean-pop group BTS featured Halsey in single “Boy With Luv” which broke many records, with the most notable being the 78 million views the music video gained in 24 hours on Youtube.
On May 17, 2019, Halsey released stand-alone single, “Nightmare,” initially intended to be the first single of Manic.
Following this, “Graveyard” was released, with Halsey and announcing that her third album Manic, would be released in January 2020.
