FEATURE:
Second Spin
Halsey - hopeless fountain kingdom
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LAST year…
Halsey released her best album yet with If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power. Her fourth studio album, it is an artist who talks of self-doubt and self-sabotage across a collection of songs that demonstrate her full range of talents in full flight.! Rightly lauded as one of 2021’s best albums, it is an absolutely faultless work. With a recent video for Girl Is a Gun impressing and showing what a hugely creative and astonishing artist she is, Halsey will also appear in a future film, National Anthem. The New Jersey-born artist is going from strength to strength. Destined to be a big film actor and one of the defining artists of her generation, there is no telling how big and iconic she will grow! Not to dampen that flame, but one of her albums has not received the acclaim it deserves…
Maybe Halsey herself would view hopeless fountain kingdom as a transition record. Her 2015 debut, BADLANDS, was a great album that showed huge sparks of potential. 2020’s Manic got huge reviews, and it is almost as strong as If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power. I feel hopeless fountain kingdom is a lot stronger than the reviews suggested. Even though it has been certified Platinum and went to number one in the U.S., it is a more radio-friendly album than anything else she has done. Maybe a bit commercial in places and complete with a couple of weak tracks, it is clear that the magnificent Halsey would fulfil her true potential on her next album. I really like hopeless fountain kingdom. It has some of her best songs on it – including Eyes Closed and Sorry -, and her music videos are visually spectacular and arresting. Such a striking and beguiling artist, Haley (real name Ashley Nicolette Frangipane) brought in collaborators like Quavo and Lauren Jauregui. She is strongest when she is on her own and is definitely up front and unaccompanied.
I want to bring together a couple of contrasting reviews. The first, from NME, is a more positive one. On the whole, hopeless fountain kingdom got a fairly positive response, though Halsey’s other three albums have received a more positive critical reaction. NME stated the following in their assessment of an album that I feel is incredibly strong:
“Appearing on The Chainsmokers’ 2016 mega-hit ‘Closer’ has had a big impact on Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, AKA Halsey. Her 2015 debut ‘Badlands’ made her a cult popstar. ‘Closer’ made her a household name.
In truth, ‘Closer’ has a trace of blandness Halsey stampedes past when working on her own. ‘Hopeless Fountain Kingdom’ gets by on a universal quality, but there’s a personal touch you don’t find on everyday pop full-lengths. It’s a break-up album, placed in the context of a Romeo And Juliet-inspired world. The record even begins with the prologue to the Shakespearean tragedy, while the video for ‘Now Or Never’ is like her own take on Baz Luhrmann’s iconic 1996 film.
On ‘Sorry’ she admits to treating “the people that I love like jewellery” over heart-wrenching pianos. “I didn’t mean to try you on,” she sings. ‘Good Mourning’ gives Rihanna-gone-sci-fi-vibes, while ‘Bad At Love’ recalls the singer’s past relationships.
‘Hopeless Fountain Kingdom’ might be defiantly ambitious, but it’s surprisingly cohesive. Even cameos from Fifth Harmony’s Lauren Jauregui and Migos’ Quavo, and co-writes from Sia and Greg Kurstin can’t derail the feeling this is 100 per cent her own output.
The only time a guest threatens to overshadow her is on ‘Eyes Closed’, co-written by The Weeknd and drenched in his brooding R&B signature. But it’s far from the best song on the record, proving Halsey’s fast moving from cult hero to global superstar”.
To end up, I will bring in Pitchfork’s take. They had some positive things to offer - though they were a little bit more ambivalent towards Halsey and her second studio album:
“Halsey’s sophomore album *hopeless fountain kingdom *comes with a backstory to rival an ARG. There were actual fountains and actual newspapers sent to actual doorsteps, but in 2017 this is the status quo. Tove Lo’s debut as the voice of Max Martin’s Wolf Cousins writing collective was presented as a four-part concept album about emotional turmoil. Beyoncé’s last two albums are bona fide franchises. Artists from The Fame-era Lady Gaga to suddenly-woke Katy Perry conduct album campaigns about how their music truly means something. It’s easy to see why: Streaming is a hopeless penny fountain, radio is a hopeless playlist kingdom, so one scrounges any extramusical interest one can. And most musicians prefer to think they’re making art, not content—especially with an audience that demands increasing creative control from artists and an industry that doesn’t keep up.
This is certainly less outwardly exploitative than the antiquated pop model of finding a teen, then corrupting their fictionalized innocent image for public ogling. Halsey’s bid at true meaning on hopeless fountain kingdom is to simply prove she’s “more than capable of writing radio music,” as she told Rolling Stone. The concept is ambitious, but the product ticks all the boxes: staid piano ballad (“Sorry”), In the Zone* *nostalgia (“Walls Could Talk”), R&B dilettantism (“Don’t Play,” Quavo-assisted “Lie”), recreations of proven hits (“Now or Never”). Of course, ever since she said she was raised on Biggie and Nirvana while getting high on kind and legal bud on *Badland’*s “New Americana,” Halsey has been accused of inauthenticity. Everything from her hairstyle to her racial and sexual identity has been seized upon as clues to debunk the enterprise. *The New York Times *called her “a millennial built in a lab.” Grantland: “Halsey’s life can be reduced to a perfect millennial construct.” Halsey lamented to Billboard the “conspiracy theorists who think [she] was crafted in a boardroom.” However, who but an actual Tumblr teen would imagine herself on a Rider-Waite card or dream up a post-teenage apocalypse where the only scarcity is connection?
“100 Letters” sets the scene: dingy floors, negs, and would-be love notes destroyed in the wash. The production is fittingly dirgelike with new age percussion loops and far away decaying guitar samples, like an Enigma track left overnight in a dive-bar bathroom. “Alone,” plush with brass and cellos, also sounds ‘90s: like a track off Everything But the Girl’s Temperamental if someone were actively having a panic attack over it. The lyrics cut through parties and drinks and hangers-on as Halsey’s vocal climbs the scale, increasingly agitated, up to the last, worst anxiety: “I know you’re dying to meet me, but I can just tell you this/Baby as soon as you meet me, you’ll wish that you never did.” “Eyes Closed” portrays that timeless gambit of getting over someone by getting under someone else, as well as the timely gambit of getting into co-writer The Weeknd’s production drears, withering melodies, and joyless sex. But while the backing vocals sound like Tesfaye, he’d never write something so abandoned as “he’ll never stay—they never do.”
The album’s not entirely anhedonic. The heart-thud pace and breathless quotables in “Heaven in Hiding” suggest genuine lust—that lurid diary entry with 25 blank pages on either side. Nor, despite the sheer quantity of shitty dudes here, is it just men who fail to connect. “Strangers” shimmers and yearns like a recent Tegan and Sara cut, with Heartthrob co-writer Greg Kurstin and with Fifth Harmony’s Lauren Jauregui as duettist. Jauregui, like Halsey, is bisexual, and “Strangers” is Halsey’s stated attempt to get a love song between two women onto pop radio. Not coincidentally, it contains the album’s most nuanced lyrics, the coupling that’s most promising yet most out of reach.
On an album full of radio experiments, some succeed—“100 Letters,” “Walls Could Talk” and “Alone” demonstrate the perennially fertile sound of alt-pop—and some inevitably fail. The two R&B tracks are a swagger void. “Devil in Me” is hopeless fountain kingdom’s requisite Sia track, and like so many others, Halsey makes it sound like anything but. More damningly, style never quite matches substance. That could be the young creative’s “taste gap”; Halsey is just 22. Or it could be the market. Is lead single “Now or Never,” as the story goes, “one part in the center of a long narrative that tells the story of two people in love despite the forces trying to keep them apart”? Or is it just writer Starrah commissioned to make another, poppier “Needed Me”—less prickly, less urban, less precise with the vocals? To some, it might not matter. Others might await a kingdom built on more than just airplay”.
Maybe the middle of the album is not as strong as the rest, though Halsey is commanding, hugely listenable and accomplished throughout. A stunning singer and songwriter, we need to give the underrated hopeless fountain kingdom another spin. Maybe it was being judged against her debut album or what critics thought Halsey should have released. With a couple more albums under her belt, I think that hopeless fountain kingdom does not stand out as average or anything other than a solid album. She has grown as a writer and performer since 2017, but she proved her worth on hopeless fountain kingdom. One of the music’s world’s most dizzyingly talented artists and a human being that captures the breath and moves the senses, go and check out Halsey’s hopeless fountain kingdom. It is a truly great album that Halsey…
SHOULD be proud of