Background and career
Ashley Nicolette Frangipane (IPA: FRAN-jih-PAH-nee; born September 29, 1994), known professionally as Halsey ( HAWL-zee), is an American singer-songwriter and actress. Noted for her distinctive singing voice, she has received numerous accolades, including three Billboard Music Awards, a Billboard Women in Music Award, and an American Music Award, as well as nominations for three Grammy Awards. She was on Time's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2020. Halsey was born and grew up in Central Jersey. Gaining attention from self-released music on social media platforms, she signed with Astralwerks in 2014 and released her debut extended play (EP), Room 93, in October of that year. Her debut studio album, Badlands (2015), was met with critical and commercial success—debuting at number two on the Billboard 200. It was certified double platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), along with its singles "Colors", "Gasoline", and "New Americana", the latter of which became her first entry on the US Billboard Hot 100 at number 60. In 2016, Halsey co-performed with the Chainsmokers on their single "Closer", which topped the charts in the US and ten countries, also receiving an 18× platinum certification from the RIAA. Her second studio album, Hopeless Fountain Kingdom (2017) embodied a more "radio-friendly" sound and debuted atop the Billboard 200, while its singles "Now or Never" and "Bad at Love", both entered the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100—the latter peaked within the top five. Her 2018 single, "Eastside" (with Benny Blanco and Khalid), found continued success and peaked within the top ten. Later that year, she was moved to Capitol Records. Halsey's third studio album, Manic (2020), became her best-selling album worldwide. Its lead single, "Without Me" topped the Billboard Hot 100, received a diamond certification from the RIAA, and yielded her furthest commercial success as a lead artist. Her fourth album, If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power (2021), moved away from her previous sound in favor of a darker industrial sound to generally positive reception. She then parted ways with Capitol in 2023, following a controversy surrounding the release of her non-album single "So Good" the year prior. After signing with Columbia Records, Halsey's fifth studio album The Great Impersonator followed in 2024. By 2020, Billboard reported that her albums had sold over one million combined units, and received over six billion streams in the United States. Aside from music, she has been involved in suicide prevention awareness, sexual assault victim advocacy, and racial justice protests.
Ashley Nicolette Frangipane was born on September 29, 1994, in Edison, New Jersey, the daughter of Nicole and Chris Frangipane. Her parents dropped out of college after her mother discovered that she was pregnant with her. Halsey's mother works as an emergency medical technician (EMT), while her father manages a car dealership. Her mother has Italian and Hungarian ancestry, while her father is African American with a small amount of Irish ancestry. She has two younger brothers named Sevian and Dante. She played the violin, viola, and cello, before taking up playing the guitar when she was 14 years old. She grew up listening to Alanis Morissette, Justin Bieber, and Brand New. Throughout her childhood, her family moved frequently, as her parents worked many jobs. By the time she became a teenager, she had enrolled in six schools. She was raised Catholic. Frangipane was bullied at school, and a suicide attempt at the age of 17 led to her being hospitalized for nearly three weeks. Following this, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, with which her mother was also diagnosed. Halsey began using drugs soon after, saying her bipolar disorder caused her to become an "unconventional child". At age 17, she became romantically involved with a man who was 24 and resided near Halsey Street station in Brooklyn, from which she took her stage name. She said, "That's where I first start[ed] writing music and where I started to feel like I was a part of something bigger than my town in middle of nowhere New Jersey. Halsey is kind of like a manifestation of all the exaggerated parts of me, so it's like an alter ego." In 2012, she graduated from Warren Hills Regional High School in Washington, New Jersey. After graduating, Frangipane enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design, but she withdrew due to financial hardship and instead attended community college. She eventually dropped out of community college and was kicked out by her parents, who she said "just didn't agree with a lot of things about [her]". Soon after, she lived in a basement in Lower Manhattan with a group of "degenerate stoners" she knew through her then-boyfriend. When she was not living there, she occasionally lived in one of New York's many homeless shelters, and she considered prostitution as a way to make money. When describing this period of her life, she has said, "I remember one time I had $9 in my bank account, and bought a four-pack of Red Bull and used it to stay up overnight over the course of two or three days, because it was less dangerous to not sleep than it was to sleep somewhere random and maybe get raped or kidnapped." She would occasionally stay with her maternal grandmother during this time.
Frangipane started writing music when she was 17, and in 2012, she began posting videos to social media sites such as YouTube and Kik, and in particular Tumblr, under the username se7enteenblack. She became known for a parody of Taylor Swift's song "I Knew You Were Trouble", inspired by Swift's relationship with Harry Styles. She then wrote a follow-up song about their relationship, which was posted online in early 2013. In early 2014, Frangipane went to a party and met a "music guy" who asked her to collaborate on a song with him because he liked her voice. The result, a song about her ex-boyfriend, titled "Ghost", was posted by Frangipane on SoundCloud several weeks after it was recorded. Within hours, the song gained online popularity and she was subsequently contacted by several record labels, with the song eventually charting and going on radio. She signed with Astralwerks, feeling that they gave her more creative freedom than other labels that contacted her. Following this, Frangipane played numerous acoustic shows in different cities under several stage names. She chose Halsey as her permanent stage name because it is an anagram of her first name and is also a reference to the Halsey Street station of the New York City Subway in Brooklyn, a place where she spent a lot of time as a teenager. She also stated Halsey was the most popular name she used. Having written poems for years, Halsey began writing more serious songs as a way to promote them. Music became her "confessional approach" and a form of therapy after the difficult life she had endured. Halsey began touring with The Kooks in August 2014 and performed various original songs. She released her debut extended play, Room 93, on October 27, 2014. The EP charted in the lower regions of the US Billboard 200 and at number three on the Top Heatseekers chart.
Halsey then began work on her debut studio album and performed songs from it at South by Southwest in 2015, where she was the most tweeted-about performer of the night. She embarked on a co-headlining tour with Young Rising Sons in March, and in June, she became the opening act for Imagine Dragons during the North American leg of their Smoke + Mirrors Tour (2015). Halsey's debut studio album, Badlands, was released on August 28, 2015. She said Badlands is a concept album about a dystopian future society known as "The Badlands", which was a metaphor for her mental state at the time and that each song meant something different to them. She wrote all of the songs on the album when she was 19, and the album has a number of producers, including then-boyfriend, Norwegian producer Lido. The album was described by Halsey as not having a "proper radio hit". It received positive reviews from music critics, with Joe Levy of Rolling Stone citing Halsey as a "new Tumblr popstar with a knack for sticky imagery". Badlands debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 albums chart in the US, selling 115,000 copies in its first week, of which 97,000 were pure album sales. The album found success in several other countries, including Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, where the album debuted in the top three. It was further promoted by Halsey's Badlands Tour (2015–16), and her spot as the opening act for select dates of The Weeknd's The Madness Fall Tour (2015). Badlands was certified two-times Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for US sales of 2,000,000 units. Four singles were released from the album: "Ghost", "New Americana", "Colors", and "Castle", all of which were certified Platinum in the US. The latter three singles achieved minor commercial success: "New Americana" reached number 60 on the US Billboard Hot 100, "Castle" was rerecorded for the soundtrack of the 2016 film The Huntsman: Winter's War. "Gasoline" was not released as a single and was only included on the deluxe version of Badlands, but became one of the album's most popular tracks and was certified Platinum in the US.
Halsey was featured on the song "The Feeling" by Justin Bieber for his fourth studio album, Purpose (2015). The song was not officially released as a single, though it entered the top forty of the Billboard Hot 100 and was certified Gold in the US and Silver in the United Kingdom. In February 2016, Halsey was one of four female performers to partner with MAC cosmetics for their Future Forward line; she released a lipstick named after herself. The senior vice president and group creative director of the company, James Gager, said, "It feels like a great thing to be able to support artists who are breaking through but aren't necessarily at the top top, to push them forward." In May 2016, Halsey released the song "Tokyo Narita (Freestyle)", produced by Lido. The song was a standalone track that served as a promotional single for both her and Lido. In July 2016, she collaborated with 26 other artists for the charity single "Hands", which was a tribute for the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting. On July 29, 2016, Halsey was featured as a vocalist on the Chainsmokers' single "Closer", a song she also cowrote. The track achieved major commercial success: it topped the Billboard Hot 100 for 12 consecutive weeks, topped the charts of 12 other countries, sold more than 15 million units worldwide, and is one of the most streamed songs on Spotify. The official lyric video for "Closer" was released on YouTube on July 29, 2016, and has since garnered over two billion views. Billboard magazine noted Halsey's solo verse as a favorable part of the song, and the song earned her a Grammy Award nomination for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance.
Halsey announced work on her second studio album prior to the release of Badlands, with progress on the record continuing throughout 2016 and 2017. In January 2017, she released the single "Not Afraid Anymore"; it appears on the soundtrack of the film Fifty Shades Darker (2017). "Now or Never" was released on April 4 as the lead single from her second studio album. The song debuted at number 52 on the US Billboard Hot 100 and later peaked at number 17. It was certified 2× Platinum by the RIAA. "Now or Never" also reached the top 20 of Australia and Malaysia, and sold 500,000 units outside of the US. Two promotional singles were also made available prior to the release of the album: "Eyes Closed" and "Strangers"'. The record, Hopeless Fountain Kingdom, finally came out on June 2. It consisted of more "radio friendly" songs in comparison to her previous work, which she attributed to her desire to prove she was "more than capable" of creating "radio-ready" music. Much like her debut, Hopeless Fountain Kingdom is a concept album that revolves around a pair of lovers in a tale based on Romeo and Juliet; the project was inspired by her breakup with Lido. The album also focuses on Halsey's bisexuality and on bisexual characters. Hopeless Fountain Kingdom debuted atop the Billboard 200 and the Canadian Albums Chart. First-week sales in the US were of 106,000 units, with 76,000 being pure album sales. Similar to her debut, Hopeless Fountain Kingdom was certified Platinum by the RIAA. Due to its rise to number one, Halsey became the first woman to achieve a number one album in the US in 2017. To promote the record, Halsey embarked on the Hopeless Fountain Kingdom World Tour, which began on September 29, 2017, her twenty-third birthday. The artist also performed surprise DJ sets at Emo Nite in Los Angeles in 2017. The second single from Hopeless Fountain Kingdom, "Bad at Love", was released on August 22. The song peaked at number five in the US, which made it her highest peak as a lead artist at the time. It was certified 4× Platinum by the RIAA, and sold more than 300,000 records outside the US. In December, Halsey's collaboration with then-boyfriend G-Eazy, "Him & I", was released, and later peaked at number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 and achieved a 2× Platinum certification by the RIAA in the US. The song also reached the top ten of 13 other countries' charts. Halsey also collaborated with the band Thirty Seconds to Mars on the song "Love Is Madness", from their 2018 album America. On January 13, 2018, Halsey was featured as a musical guest on the American television variety show Saturday Night Live, where she performed "Bad at Love" and "Him & I", with G-Eazy. On March 15, she released "Alone", together with a new version featuring American rapper Big Sean and British rapper Stefflon Don. It was released as the third and final single from Hopeless Fountain Kingdom, and a music video came out in April. "Alone" was certified Platinum by the RIAA and reached number one on Billboard's Dance Club chart, though it only peaked at number 66 on the Billboard Hot 100. Halsey sang with Khalid on Benny Blanco's debut single "Eastside", which was released on July 12, along with a music video discussing various parts of Halsey's life. The song peaked at number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 and topped the charts of five other countries. It was certified 2× Platinum in the US, and sold over one million units outside the country. Also in the same year, she appeared in two films: she voiced Wonder Woman in Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, and cameoed as herself in A Star Is Born, directed by Bradley Cooper. Halsey was also a key advisor on the US version of The Voice in its fifteenth season.
