Halsey Set Out to Make 'Angry Dark Music' With New 'Manic' Album

On Monday (Sept. 16), Halsey visited Apple Music’s Beats 1 host Zane Lowe to discuss “Graveyard,” her latest single from her upcoming album Manic, which will be released Jan. 17. In the song, she acknowledges her mistakes and holds herself accountable because “it’s very human,” Halsey says.

“A lot of those sounds are super organic. It’s a lot of people sounds…. It’s skin, you hear skin, you can tell there’s people making it,” she said in the interview. Her recent music -- she says “Nightmare,” for instance, is a record deemed enlightening for its national timeliness but proven maddening vis-à-vis the singer-songwriter’s emotions -- is an accumulation of “angry dark music.”

"I sat there to make this album and I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to make an angry album,’" she said. "And I wasn’t mad. It’s exciting. ... I’m closing a chapter in this record that I feel very much like I needed to put the final word on, put the nail in the coffin, if you will. Graveyard, marry it.”

“Graveyard” is an acknowledgement of how Halsey feels about love, from the “blind declaration” sung in her No. 1 hit “Without Me” to telling her fans she’s taking responsibility for the “not necessarily safe” positions she’s been in.

She told Lowe, “In some ways it’s a metaphor. It’s about like loving someone to death, kind of. And then in other ways it’s actually pretty literal. There’s a lot of moments in the song that are pretty literal, which was kind of scary to write about. But you know me, I find the scary thing and I do it.”

Watch the rest of Halsey’s interview here.