“It’s also the first time Halsey’s work will not hide behind a concept, though there is, she says, a “motif.” “There’s a lot of exploration of l’appel du vide, which is French for ‘the call of the void,’ ” she’d told me back in L.A. “It’s that thing in the back of our minds that drives us to outrageous thoughts. Like when you’re driving a car and you’re like” — she mimics cutting the wheel — “or you’re on top of a building, and you’re like, ‘What if I just jump?’ ” That, she says, is what her manic periods are like. “You are controlled by those impulses rather than logic and reason.”
lorde really wrote an album about being the kid that stayed home when people went out and had to keep a reputation of being nice and modest and polite but secretly wanting to go crazy and dance wildly and go running and bounding and sobbing but feeling as though your whole life hinges on other people giving you the opportunity to do it and so you feel as though you’re wasting your youth