Halsey battles existentialism and health struggles on her chilling new single “The End,” the first offering from her forthcoming fifth studio album. “Long story short, I’m lucky to be alive,” the musician wrote on social media. “Short story short, I wrote an album. It beings with The End.”
“Every couple of years now, a doctor says I’m sick/Pulls 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 don’t like to complain, but I’m saying sorry,” Halsey sings on the swelling acoustic track. “When I met you, I thought I was damaged goods/Had a fucked up 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 hold me in the dark?”
At the time of the song’s release, Halsey shared a five-post carousel on Instagram spotlighting the same physical and emotional pain she narrates on the record. In one slide, she runs her hands up and down her legs to sooth pain there, noting: “I feel like an old lady. I told myself I’m giving myself two more years to be sick. At 30, I’m having a rebirth and I’m not gonna be sick and I’m gonna look super hot and have so much energy and just get to re-do my twenties in my thirties.”
In another slide, she documents her first day of treatment. Another is a compilation of the singer with tears in her eyes as she goes through the process of trying out different medications and spending more time than she’d like to in hospital rooms. This all makes it into the song.
“So I ran into the clinic and I asked to see the man/With his white coat and his stethoscope/Like a snake around his hand/And I told him I’m not bitter ’cause 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 wrestled in the mud/And I told him he could stay right where he stood/But I don’t know if he should/’Cause once my God destroys the flesh, then there’s the flood.”
Halsey is donating to both the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society as well as the Lupus Research Alliance.
The record arrived just days after Halsey teased the track in a handwritten letter to fans. “Before the first single comes, I wanted to share this. It means a lot to me and I love it,” she wrote on Instagram Monday. In her letter to fans, Halsey teased that the new track was “just for us” before she officially started promoting the new set of songs. “There’s so much I’m going to reveal on this record, but you need to know some of the story first,” Halsey continued. “So before the chaos and confetti of big singles and album releases I just need to tell you, my friend, why it all matters this time.”
Halsey has also been teasing the new era with her For My Last Track website, with Seventies references, old letters, and easter eggs for her fans. One part of the site links to a Spotify playlist titled “?” featuring 29 songs that seemingly inspired her next era.
Halsey’s latest LP, the rock-infused album If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power co-produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Rose, was released back in 2021. The new music will also serve as her first release under Columbia Records after signing with the label following a split from Capitol Records.
Last year, she reimagined her song “Lilith” with Suga for the Diablio IV video game and dropped a solo version of Post Malone’s “Die For Me.”
From Rolling Stone US.