Halsey wrestles with existentialism and health on her new single “The End,” the first offering from her upcoming fifth studio album. “Long, I'm lucky to be alive,” the musician wrote on social media. “Long story short, I wrote an album. It is with the End.”
“Every couple of years now, a doctor says I'm sick/Brings out a brand new bag of tricks/And then they lay it on me/And at first it was my brain, then a skeleton in pain/And I do I don't like to complain, but I say sorry,” Halsey sings on the soaring acoustic track. “When I met you, I thought I was spoilt/I had a fucking childhood/And there's poison in my brain and in my blood/If you knew it was the end of the world/Could you love me like a child?/Could you keeping me in the dark?'
At the time of the song's release, Halsey shared a carousel of five Instagram posts highlighting the same physical and emotional pain she chronicles on the record. In one slide, she runs her hands up and down her legs to ease the pain there, noting, “I feel like an old lady. I told myself I was giving myself two more years to get sick. In my 30s, I'm having a rebirth and I won't get sick and I'll look really hot and I'll have so much energy and I'll be in my twenties again in my thirties.”
In another slide, she records the first day of her treatment. Another is a collection of the teary-eyed singer as she goes through the process of trying different drugs and spending more time than she'd like in hospital rooms. All of that goes into the song.
“So I ran to the clinic and asked to see the man/With his white coat and his stethoscope/Like a snake around his arm/And I told him I'm not bitter because I finally found a lover/Who's better for my liver , and now I'll finally recover,” Halsey sings on “The End,” noting, “When I met him, I thought I was damaged goods/From a real bad neighborhood/So we fought in the mud/And I told him he could stay right where he stood/But I don't know if I should/'Cause when God destroys my flesh, then there's the flood.
The record arrived just days after Halsey teased the track in a handwritten letter to fans. “Before the first single came out, I wanted to share it. It means a lot to me and I love it,” she wrote on Instagram on Monday. In her letter to fans, Halsey teased that the new track was “just for us” before she officially began promoting the new set of songs. “There's so much I'm going to reveal on this record, but you have to know some of the history first,” Halsey continued. “Well, before the chaos and confetti of big singles and album releases, I just have to tell you, my friend, why it all matters this time.”
Halsey is also teasing the new age with her website For My Last Track, with references to the 70s, old letters and Easter eggs for her fans. A portion of the site is linked to a Spotify playlist titled “?” with 29 songs that seemingly inspired her next era.
Halsey's latest LP, the rock album If I can't have love, I want power co-produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Rose, was released in 2021. The new music will also be her first release under Columbia Records after signing with the label following a split from Capitol Records.
Last year, she reworked her song 'Lilith' with Suga for them Diablo IV video game and released a solo version of Post Malone's “Die For Me.”
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/halsey-the-end-single-health-struggles-1235031957/
