There are quite a few records across Halsey‘s debut album, Badlands, that require an exhaustive exertion of energy when coming alive on stage. “Gasoline,” “Castle,” and “Control,” in particular, call for both the musician and her audience to give it their all. Halsey will perform these songs, along with some career deep cuts and B-sides, when she performs the album in its entirety on the Back to Badlands Tour. In anticipation of the show, she has been undergoing chemotherapy treatments to ensure she can rise to the occasion.
Last year, Halsey revealed that they were diagnosed with lupus and a rare T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder in 2022. After battling both quietly for two years, the singer-songwriter let fans in on their secret with The Great Impersonator, their fifth studio album, released this past October. She’s keeping them up to speed as she heads into the anniversary tour, too. “Just did another few sessions of chemo, had a new port placed,” Halsey listed off in a recent TikTok. “We just put the Back to Badlands show together, and it’s gonna be unbelievable, so amazing.”
The list of updates continued with notes about Halsey’s upcoming 31st birthday (“I’m so busy, I haven’t even honestly thought about it at all), tour rehearsals (scheduled to begin “very soon”), and the tour setlist. “I’m so excited about it,” they shared. “I’m bringing back a ton of really fun nostalgic little references from the very first Badlands tour. I’m playing the entire album, plus a bunch of other extra fun ones.”
Honoring Badlands with a new live show was on the list of milestones Halsey worried she wouldn’t be able to complete when she first got sick. “It’s all I ruminated on at the time, all the stuff that I wanted to do and might not get the chance to do,” she recently told Rolling Stone. “Badlands was definitely one of them. I was just like, I would have loved to have made the ‘Drive’ video. I would have loved to have done an anniversary tour.”
In their TikTok update, Halsey recounted an exchange they had with their fiancé, Avan Jogia, while riding past one of the Back to Badlands tour venues. “He pointed to Hollywood Forever cemetery, and he looked at me and went, ‘You’re gonna be in there soon,’” the singer said. After appearing visibly taken aback, she continued, he clarified, “Oh, my god, no. I mean for your show — the first show of your tour.”
“I was like, ‘Oh, okay, that’s way better than what I thought you meant,’” Halsey said. “Can’t wait to be in there soon.”
Halsey teased the Back to Badlands Tour in her interview with Rolling Stone. “The Back to Badlands Tour really is about everything Badlands is about, but in the context of what I’ve learned now and which of those subjects remain in my life, which ones I’ve grown from, and which ones have changed,” they said. “There’s a really humbling experience as a musician when you sing a song that you wrote 10 years ago and you realize that it’s still relevant, and you’re like, ‘I guess I haven’t learned my goddamn lesson.’ You’re being forced to relive that all the time. That’s really what this tour is going to be about for me.”
