{"id":45694,"date":"2025-09-04T15:45:32","date_gmt":"2025-09-04T15:45:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/04\/badlands-10th-anniversary-2025-tour-videos\/"},"modified":"2025-09-04T15:45:32","modified_gmt":"2025-09-04T15:45:32","slug":"badlands-10th-anniversary-2025-tour-videos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/04\/badlands-10th-anniversary-2025-tour-videos\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Badlands’ 10th Anniversary, 2025 Tour, Videos"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\n\tWhen the clock struck midnight on Aug. 28, 2015, Halsey<\/a> was sitting in her first Los Angeles apartment. Her one-bedroom in Studio City was hundreds of miles away from the Brooklyn neighborhoods that inspired her anagrammed stage name<\/a> and countless stories to tell. Those streets, with their bizarre characters and ominous affairs, were a short distance from where she grew up in New Jersey, though that place seemed far away, too. Everything was changing for the musician, who was 20 years old at the time, but she was removed from it. There were no addresses that felt more like home to her than the one she\u2019d created herself on her debut album, Badlands<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWith Badlands<\/em>, I think I succeeded in the way that I did because I didn\u2019t know what it was like to fail yet,\u201d Halsey tells Rolling Stone <\/em>over Zoom on the record\u2019s 10th anniversary. \u201cI didn\u2019t know what it was like to win, either, but I didn\u2019t have the same pressures. I made most of that record in someone\u2019s bedroom and sat on the edge of a twin bed recording vocals through pantyhose because I couldn\u2019t afford a pop filter \u2014 they\u2019re like $9, for the record.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen the album came out, she adds, that night was like many others that preceded it. \u201cI would come off of the set of these music videos, do these interviews, but then I would go back home to my regular life where I would chain-smoke cigarettes on my balcony and my landlord would get mad at me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHalsey\u2019s audience has always been drawn to the way she filtered real-life mundanity through the lens of digital aspiration. She reminded fans that castles could be built from their ruins. When they first encountered her<\/a> on Tumblr,<\/a> blogging under the name Se7enteenblack, the internet was still a place of relative anonymity and escapism. Ashley Frangipane was the one looking to get away. Halsey was the one who turned the key in the ignition and sped off.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBadlands<\/em> was so pure because I only had what was available to me,\u201d Halsey says. \u201cAll I had going for me were my ideas, so they had to be good and I had to depend on them.\u201d They conceptualized music videos that interrogated betrayal, intimacy, and isolation in technicolor scenes. They created a fake airline and travel agency that gave fans boarding passes and passports to access exclusive events. They wrote songs about what it felt like to carry the weight of the people, feelings, and memories that settled into her bones and refused to leave, and about growing up too fast. Badlands<\/em> opened up the world for Halsey. Some of what they found there changed them for the better, some gave them four more albums worth of material to excavate, some knocked them off-course.<\/p>\n

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\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\t\u201cMy second record, <\/em>Hopeless Fountain Kingdom<\/em><\/a>, I\u2019m so proud of it \u2014 but it is a brief moment where I lost the plot a little bit,\u201d Halsey says. \u201cI thought that this high-concept, high-design, really expensive, tailored by someone else both physically and metaphorically speaking, curated person was what was expected of me. I desperately didn\u2019t want to fail and I desperately didn\u2019t want to get sent back home.\u201d They maxed out budgets and collaborated with people on that 2017 album just because they could. It was so different from the time she spent generally unsupervised while making her debut. When she took in the scene during a television performance \u2014 her hair platinum blonde and pulled into a ponytail, and a crew of backup dangers surrounding her \u2014 she wondered what the hell she was even doing. She didn\u2019t know how it all got so complicated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>

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\t\t\t\t\tOnstage at a sold-out show at New York\u2019s Webster Hall in the fall of 2015.<\/span><\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNicky Digital\/Corbis\/Getty Images<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tIt was the first time Halsey really ached to go back to the beginning. That yearning returned in 2020, when they planned to go all out for Badlands<\/em>\u2018 fifth anniversary. The pandemic guaranteed that wouldn\u2019t happen, so they decided to wait another five years. In that time, they became a mother, then shortly after was diagnosed<\/a> with lupus and a rare T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder. By then, they had learned what it was like to both win and fail, but this was something entirely different. For all of her meticulous planning that built stories within her albums and live shows, Halsey couldn\u2019t write the next scene. Instead, she retreated to the familiar solitude of Tumblr where it all began. She reblogged and published poetry and obscure images, just like she used to. Then, when the timing was right, she went back to the Badlands.<\/p>\n

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\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n

\n\tIn celebration of the record\u2019s 10th anniversary<\/a>, Halsey will embark this fall on an intimate run of shows that she\u2019s calling the Back to Badlands Tour.<\/a> They also released a long-awaited music video for the Badlands<\/em> track \u201cDrive\u201d (as part of a double feature<\/a> with \u201cGasoline\u201d) \u2014 something they first teased at the end of the \u201cNew Americana\u201d video in 2015, before saying later that it was only ever a plot device and never actually existed. Now it does, and it comes with a message that couldn\u2019t have been delivered without the wisdom earned from their lived experiences. \u201cThey raised us to believe that the Badlands are an inescapable truth when you\u2019re in captivity,\u201d Halsey says in the video. \u201cBut I\u2019ve seen behind the walls and I recorded this to let you know there is more out there. You\u2019re probably wondering who I am. But my name doesn\u2019t matter, my voice does. And now, so does yours.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tTumblr is such a weird place in the sense that so much deleted content still exists in these out-of-context fragments scattered across the site, like when you were accused of stealing the \u201cColors\u201d bridge because the lyrics you shared became a viral post before you actually released the song.\u00a0<\/strong>
That was the funniest thing that\u2019s ever happened to me. I was actually really scared at the time that I would never beat those allegations, because it felt so much bigger than me. I was 18 and I had never made anything before, and now suddenly I was being accused of plagiarism. I can\u2019t wrap my mind around the concept of me, a teenager who\u2019s never made or released or published or printed anything, and now suddenly this is a new problem I have to deal with? That was a real indication for me. Like, the types of problems you have are about to change in a big way. I was worried about my dating life, my parents, my relationship with myself and my body \u2014 normal things for an 18- or 19-year-old to be worrying about. There\u2019s no handbook for being 19 and having to deal with plagiarism allegations.<\/p>\n

\n\tHow has your relationship with that particular site changed as you return to this record?\u00a0<\/strong>
I went back to it for a year or two in a more consistent way ahead of The Great Impersonator<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>mostly because it was kind of like a safe place to speak, and also to speak sort of cryptically. People don\u2019t demand answers on there in the same way that they do on Twitter or Instagram. I wasn\u2019t ready to share my illnesses yet. I was still processing. Naturally, my way of dealing with that was by writing. I was writing all this poetry separate from what would eventually become the album, just about these real feelings of isolation that I was having, which, ironically, is where Badlands<\/em> came from.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIt came from Tumblr being a place where I could write about feelings of isolation. I was really adamant at the time that the Badlands represented a state of mind, a place where you\u2019re trapped and you try to leave \u2014 it\u2019s almost like the Severance<\/em><\/a> door. You walk out and then all of a sudden you\u2019re walking back in and you can\u2019t escape it. I was having a lot of those same feelings of entrapment and isolation, and the idea that myself and my relationship with the world is changing against my will. I was writing on Tumblr quite a bit at that time and it felt really safe.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tYour posts about the Badlands<\/em> anniversary only have around 3000 notes, if that. There\u2019s such a small community of people that still exist there and are still engaging in the same way they would have a decade ago.\u00a0<\/strong>
Most of the people who followed me on my Tumblr \u2014 and there were millions \u2014 had no idea what I looked like. I was posting my face, but if you didn\u2019t see that reblog, or you weren\u2019t on my page at that time, then you could very well be engaging with my blog and only be engaging with my poetry and my playlist recommendation. There was this real, separate relationship that wasn\u2019t so based on the ability to take a selfie, or take a video, or talk to an audience. I certainly felt confident in crafting an aesthetic. The album was obviously really cinematic, and I think that one of the great success stories of it is that people can look at an unrelated image and be able to go, \u201cOh, that\u2019s so Badlands<\/em>.\u201d I feel like that\u2019s the hallmark of a cohesive aesthetic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBut for me at the time, if I\u2019m going to be completely honest with you, I was just really far behind [other artists] in terms of image creation. That is actually what ended up becoming my image at that time. I really did just look like another kid. My hair was all fucked up, my dye job was bad, or my hair was bleached, or my weave was terrible. My clothes all came from American Apparel or Urban Outfitters. It wasn\u2019t fancy, it wasn\u2019t costumes. I was really not ready to become a famous person. I had dental work I needed to get done. I was too embarrassed to smile. I didn\u2019t have a workout routine. I didn\u2019t know how to pose on a red carpet for years \u2014 I still don\u2019t, to be honest with you. I put so much stock and so much emphasis on the visual environment of the record and the music itself that when people started evaluating me<\/em>, I was really unprepared.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen did you first realize how much your audience had grown beyond those fans who witnessed the Badlands<\/em> rollout in real time?<\/strong>
I still have a hard time remembering that my audience has grown beyond that initial fandom. I used to be able to go online at a certain point in time and basically see everyone who was a fan of mine. The concept of casual fans was a really hard thing for me to wrap my head around and continues to be. Another thing that was so unique about that record cycle that caused a real existential change for me as my career started to grow was that I built my fan base from a point of accessibility. I think people initially were like, \u201cThat\u2019s my friend Ashley who makes music. We talk online sometimes.\u201d And then when I had to go become a celebrity, my life changed. I couldn\u2019t have those relationships anymore. It was hard for me because I was like, I don\u2019t know how to engage a fan without being their best friend \u2014 and now I have to because there\u2019s just way too many people.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen I did my first few tours, I would go outside after the show and I would meet every single person. I\u2019d be out there in the cold till three o\u2019clock in the morning by the buses. I took pictures with everyone. I remembered things about everyone, and I still do to a certain extent. I so deeply and earnestly see everybody as a real fucking person. It was so personal in the beginning, so I have a very hard time divorcing myself from the fact that that\u2019s a real person who I let down because I\u2019m not coming to their city. It\u2019s just different than it used to be, and it\u2019s really hard for me sometimes to divorce myself from the only way that I ever knew it to be, which was the way that I was inducted into it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBadlands<\/em> really gave people a world to exist in, and an identity to try on and find themselves through.<\/strong>
I remember having a conversation with my mom a couple years before I got kicked out of the house, and her being like, \u201cWhat are you doing up there all day?\u201d I\u2019m like, \u201cI\u2019m building my brand, talking to fans.\u201d And she was like, \u201cI\u2019m gonna have to put my kid in a mental hospital. She\u2019s in her bedroom in our two-bedroom condo and she thinks that she\u2019s gonna be famous and that she\u2019s building a brand, whatever the fuck that means.\u201d She tells that story all the time now, because obviously it\u2019s so funny in retrospect. Leading up to Badlands<\/em>, I didn\u2019t know it at the time, but I guess I was kind of functioning like an early internet influencer.<\/p>\n

\n\tI was just completely unaware of it because we never really had a word for it at the time. We had just started calling YouTubers \u201cYouTubers.\u201d But that\u2019s not really what I was doing. I was really just on Tumblr. That\u2019s one thing that I think was important in the creation of Halsey. I just had so much time. I had time to research references and films and music and poetry, and I didn\u2019t have a ton of friends, so I was online all the time. I could really put in the hours, put in the legwork. I took that dedication and I applied it to the way that I made a record. So it only felt natural to me to do a record that was more than just songs and music videos, and then you go do a tour. I wanted to cross-reference it with a bunch of other different types of media.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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