The Number Ones: Halsey’s “Without Me”

In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

Pop stardom is a truly strange vocation. If it involved nothing more than singing songs, or touring, or launching skincare brands, it would still be a disorienting way to spend your life. But pop stars, especially the ones who rose up in the social-media era, have to do things that aren't really in the job description. They have to carry the psychic weight of their fandoms, to act out big emotions on big stages. If a pop star goes through a messy public breakup, they have to sing about it, and their songs have to become the kind of things that their fans can then apply to their own breakups. It's not a fair thing to ask of anyone, but that's the gig.

Halsey, one of the signature pop stars of the social media era, has always had a conflicted relationship with her own pop stardom, and who could blame them? Halsey's role, at least as I understand it, is to perform and inhabit a certain ambient messiness. She doesn't come from any particular scene or genre. They don't fit neatly into any particular category, and much of the early conversation around them centered on the ways in which they transcended boundaries -- biracial, bisexual, bipolar, "raised on Biggie and Nirvana," singing computerized arena-rock anthems over trap 808s and country-fried guitars. After she got famous, Halsey went through more traumas -- endometriosis, lupus, a miscarriage, record-label battles -- in full view of the public. They later made it very clear that they use "she/they" pronouns. (I completely forgot about those pronouns in my column on the Chainsmokers' "Closer." That's my bad.)

Halsey's messiness is their single greatest subject. In videos, she spends lots of time in neon-streaked dive-bars or whirling down romantically dilapidated backstreets. Even on "Closer," Halsey's biggest pop moment, the sleek production is there to support a story about two people remembering their younger selves' squalid whirlwind love affair. There are Halsey songs about partying and having fun and falling in love, but most of their music exists in the raw, ugly aftermath of those things. Halsey's only other #1 hit is way closer to her post-breakup power-ballad wheelhouse.

I already went over the story of Ashley Frangipane's rise in the column on the Chainsmokers' "Closer." Their part on that song could've gone to any number of young pop singers, but their exposed-nerve intensity probably elevated a track that didn't have much going for it otherwise. When she recorded that "Closer" part, Halsey was a major-label prospect who was being pushed as a voice-of-a-generation type. That role never fit them, but they tried. The music on Halsey's 2015 debut Badlands did its best to occupy the lane that artists like Lana Del Rey and Lorde helped establish. Halsey sang about alienation and malaise, but it always felt a bit forced. She had to grow into it.

Halsey's 2017 sophomore album Hopeless Fountain Kingdom came in the wake of "Closer" and its dominant success, and it works as a bigger statement without quite making Halsey sound like something other than a record company's attempt to streamline jagged feelings into sleek pop music, at figuring out whether one person could be Rihanna and Lana Del Rey at the same time. Halsey worked with big-deal producers and songwriters, though they largely stayed away from the Chainsmokers-style coffeehouse EDM that would've been their most obvious, least interesting direction. Instead, she did her best to convey freewheeling, reckless young-folks intensity, and she got a couple of hits out of it. Lead single "Now Or Never" peaked at #17. The self-explanatory "Bad At Love" did even better, climbing all the way to #5. (It's a 7.) Like Badlands before it, Hopeless Fountain Kingdom went double platinum.

In promoting Hopeless Fountain Kingdom, Halsey played the game. They performed on Saturday Night Live and on tons of awards shows. She made cameos in movies -- as Wonder Woman in Teen Titans Go! To The Movies, as herself in A Star Is Born. (I really like both of those pictures. A Star Is Born will figure into this column soon enough.) They showed up on other people's records, too. "Eastside," a 2018 collab with big-deal producer Benny Blanco and singer Khalid, reached #9 in 2018. (It's a 7, and it's Blanco's highest-charting lead-artist single. Khalid's highest-charting single, the 2019 Disclosure production "Talk," peaked at #3. It's a 5.) I really like the "Eastside" video, a conceptual piece directed by Jake Schreier, the auteur behind the upcoming Marvel joint Thunderbolts.

Sometime in 2017, Halsey started dating G-Eazy, a white pop-rapper from the Bay Area who had a brief window of popularity. (G-Eazy's highest-charting single, the 2017 A$AP Rocky/Cardi B collab "No Limit," peaked at #4. It's a 7.) Together, Halsey and G-Eazy made "Him & I," a young-burnouts-in-love duet that reached #14. In 2018, she and G-Eazy broke up and got back together a couple of times before finally ending things. Later on, Halsey said that G-Eazy had been cheating on them, which is pretty much what seems to happen every time a male rapper gets into a committed relationship with a pop star. Halsey was reeling from that breakup when she recorded "Without Me," and public knowledge of that breakup almost certainly contributed to the song's success. This is probably a good place to mention that Halsey's "Without Me" has nothing to do with Eminem's "Without Me," which peaked at #2 in 2002. (It's a 9.) However, Eminem did once rhyme "Halsey" with "balls deep." Just thought you should know.

Even though "Without Me" -- this without me -- is widely understood as a song about G-Eazy, the track didn't start off with Halsey. Instead, "Without Me" comes out of a songwriting session that didn't involve Halsey. One of the people at that session was Louis Bell, a producer who's been in this column a handful of times and who will be back plenty more. His collaborators on that day were pro songwriters Amy Allen and Brittany Amaradio, the latter of whom is known professionally as Delacey. (I like the idea that Halsey and Delancey, two of the people who made "Without Me," both named themselves after New York subway stops.)

Amy Allen, a native of Maine, studied at Berklee College Of Music and came up as a protege of Kara DioGuardi, the big-deal songwriter who had a run as an American Idol judge. For a little while, Allen had an indie-pop group called Amy & The Engine, and she scored her first real hit in 2018, when she co-wrote "Back To You" for future Number Ones artist Selena Gomez. (That song peaked at #18.) These days, Allen is best-known as Sabrina Carpenter's main songwriting collaborator, and we'll see her work in this column again. Delancey comes from Orange County, and she moved to New York right after high school. She landed her first big credit in 2015, when she co-wrote the early Chainsmokers track "New York City," but she didn't have a hand in a big hit before "Without Me." She hasn't really had a hand in another big one since then, either, but she's still in the game.

Amy Allen and Delancey put their own breakup experiences into writing the earliest version of "Without Me." In 2019, Delancey told Billboard, "We had never heard a song that really talks about the empowerment of going through a tough breakup." It was Allen and Delancey's first songwriting session together, though they both knew Delancey's ex. Together, they tried to capture the feeling of going through a tough experience and making the conscious decision to grow from it. They took the song to Halsey, who quickly added her own touches and recorded a demo.

Halsey, Delancey, Amy Allen, and Louis Bell are all credited as songwriters on "Without Me." Those credits also include three other names: Justin Timberlake, Timbaland, and Scott Storch. On the "Without Me" bridge, Halsey sings a few bars from "Cry Me A River," the operatically petty celebrity-breakup song that Timberlake released in 2002. ("Cry Me A River" peaked at #3. It's a 10. It seems crazy to me that "Cry Me A River" isn't a chart-topping hit but "Without Me" is. That's pop-chart history for you, I guess. Justin Timberlake has obviously been in this column a bunch of times.) Later on, Halsey tweeted that they quoted "Cry Me A River" on "Without Me" because they "felt like the song had CMAR vibes." She's not wrong. Both tracks are all about pop-star breakups, with one side blaming the other for everything going wrong. The chopped-up, reverbed-out "Without Me" guitar riff and hesitating 808 thuds owe a lot to Timbaland's "Cry Me A River" production, too. Timberlake, Timbaland, and Storch might've had to get "Without Me" writing credits even if Halsey didn't directly quote the lyrics.

There's plenty of gross stuff about the way that "Cry Me A River" treats Timberlake's ex Britney Spears, but that's still an absolute killer of a pop song that works alien mouth-clicks and stutter-gasps into its majestic white-soul balladry. "Without Me" can't help but suffer in comparison. The big problem, I think, is Louis Bell. Halsey sings "Without Me" in a seethingly precise growl that moves up into a high-lonesome yip-yowl on the hook. The song would probably be a whole lot more impactful as a stripped-bare voice-and-guitar ballad, but that version would've probably had a tougher time on the Hot 100. Bell is the Max Martin of Spotify-core, and I guess I mean that as a backhanded compliment. Bell clearly understands how to build appealing hooks, but he smothers them in studio effects that flatten everything out, making every song sound like every other song. Lots of producers try to do what Bell does, and he's clearly more talented at it than anyone else. I just don't really like the thing that he does.

On "Without Me," Louis Bell layers tons of Halsey vocals, as well as backup vocals from Amy Allen. Some of the vocal tracks are relatively untouched, and others are so slathered in Auto-Tune that they don't sound human. Bell puts the same effects all over his production, to the point where I have no idea what's a guitar and what's a synth preset. The voice-warp effects and trap 808s and submerged keyboard hooks are so painstakingly structured that there are no dead moments on the track. Even when Halsey takes a dramatic pause, there are still plenty of muffled Halseys singing ad-libs deeper in the mix. For me, all that ear-candy has the effect of turning "Without Me," an otherwise-solid song, into computerized slurry. I probably heard "Without Me" a bunch of times before I took enough notice of the song. Maybe that was the point.

With all that said, the song itself works. It's the kind of wronged-woman breakup ballad that could've been Lilith Fair fare if it came out in the late '90s, with radically different production. Halsey flashes back to the moment that they met a poor little broken creature. She dusted this guy off, helped him heal, and turned him into something, and then he repaid her by fucking her over: "I got you off your knees, put you right back on your feet, just so you could take advantage of me." Halsey sings the "take advantage of me" part with real acid, leaping suddenly into their upper register. It's like she's Rihanna one second and then Alanis Morissette the next -- a neat trick.

"Without Me" is one side of a story. G-Eazy might dispute the idea that Halsey had to come along and save him, but breakup songs aren't supposed to be fair and objective. From Halsey's perspective, her ex is a pathetic and ungrateful worm who's deluded when he thinks that he'll be able to function without her. I don't think G-Eazy fell off just because Halsey ripped him a new one; I think he's a limited rapper whose generic handsomeness could only take him so far. But I don't think that anything Halsey sings on "Without Me" is wrong, necessarily. Then again, I find G-Eazy to be just kind of annoying in general, and that probably affects how I feel about "Without Me." When I finally got around to paying attention to the song -- I had to, since it reached #1 -- I was like, "Yeah, fuck that guy!"

Halsey released "Without Me" as a standalone single in October 2018, and it debuted at #18. The track gradually pushed its way up the Hot 100. A couple of months after its release, it dethroned Ariana Grande's "thank u, next," another track where a young pop star sings about her exes, which probably says something about that moment's confluence of pop music and social-media gossip. Some other factors definitely played into the rise of "Without Me," too. Director Colin Tilley's video has the same general vibe as Rihanna's "We Found Love" clip, and it capitalizes on its context by featuring a love interest who looks almost exactly like G-Eazy from some angles. Halsey sang the song at every televised event that would have them -- the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, the Latin Grammys, Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. In January, Juice WRLD appeared on a "Without Me" remix, so that probably helped, too. (Juice WRLD's two highest-charting tracks, 2018's "Lucid Dreams" and the posthumous 2020 Marshmello collab "Come And Go," both peaked at #2. "Lucid Dreams" is an 8, and "Come And Go" is a 7.)

But "Without Me" didn't need any pop-chart trickery to reach #1. It just did increasingly well on every pop-chart metric -- streaming, radio play, downloads. The track probably got a bit of a bounce from the end of the holiday season, and maybe people just like to hear bummed-out songs in the January doldrums. "Without Me" remains Halsey's biggest-ever streaming hit by far -- other than "Closer," anyway -- and it went diamond in 2023. The song did well around the world, too.

At first, Halsey meant for "Without Me" to be a standalone single, but it was big enough that it had to appear on an album eventually. Halsey kept cranking out new songs, many of which continued to dwell on the G-Eazy situation. None of those follow-up tracks were anywhere near as big, but I like a lot of them more than I like "Without Me." I'm quite fond of Halsey's vaguely country-adjacent diss track "You Should Be Sad" and her dizzy acoustic love song "Finally // Beautiful Stranger." Those songs weren't big hits, though they both indicate that Halsey would be good at making country if she ever wanted to go in that direction. ("You Should Be Sad" peaked at #26, and "Finally // Beautiful Stranger" didn't even make the Hot 100.)

Halsey finally released her Manic album in January 2020, a full year after "Without Me" reached #1. The timing wasn't great, partly because their one big hit was in the distant rearview and partly because the looming pandemic fucked up their touring plans. The LP was jammed with big-name collaborators like Benny Blanco and Greg Kurstin. Finneas O'Connell got in there, too, just as his little sister and collaborator Billie Eilish was taking off. (She'll be in this column soon enough.) Manic has some great songs, but it's not a great album. Pitchfork published a thoughtful and sympathetic but critical review, and Halsey responded by tweeting, "can the basement that they run p*tchfork out of just collapse already." That would've been a corny dick move anyway, but Halsey didn't seem to realize that Pitchfork is now headquartered in One World Trade and that she'd essentially just wished for another 9/11. That was a pretty funny moment, but then again, I'm not the critic who has to deal with Halsey stans flooding my mentions -- not yet, anyway.

Just like the previous two Halsey albums, Manic eventually went double platinum. In the time since "Without Me," Halsey hasn't been back into the top 10 as lead artist, though she's appeared on a couple of other artists' hits. Later in 2019, they appeared on "Boy With Luv," a single from the K-pop boy band BTS, and that song peaked at #9. A year later, she was on the aforementioned Juice WRLD's posthumous track "Life's A Mess," another #9 hit. ("Boy With Luv" is a 5, and "Life's A Mess" is a 6. Speaking of irate stans flooding mentions, BTS will appear in this column a bunch of times.)

In 2021, Halsey cashed in her considerable music-industry goodwill to record If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power, a statement-piece album produced entirely by Trent Reznor, the guy who made the other "Closer," and Atticus Ross. If you're reading Stereogum, you don't need me to tell you that Reznor and Ross are the guys in Nine Inch Nails and that they are not people who do a lot of pop-star collaborations. (Nine Inch Nails' highest-charting Hot 100 hit, 1999's "The Day The World Went Away," peaked at #17. A song built on a NIN sample will appear in this column soon.) This was an extremely cool move on Halsey's part. We now know what the Nine Inch Nails version of a big pop album sounds like, and it sounds pretty fucking good. For my money, If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power blows every other Halsey album out of the water. It wasn't built to sell, and it didn't sell. The record stalled out at gold, and lead single "I Am Not A Woman, I'm A God" peaked at #64.

After that album, Halsey's relationship with her label fell apart. Halsey had become a mother by then, and they didn't want to play the game anymore. In 2022, Halsey got into a public standoff with her bosses, going public with Capitol's decision to withhold the release of her single "So Good" unless she somehow turned it into a TikTok hit first. "So Good" ultimately came out and peaked at #51, and Halsey split from Capitol soon after. Last year, they signed with Columbia and released The Great Impersonator, an album where every song is an attempt to evoke a different icon -- PJ Harvey, Dolly Parton, Björk, etc. She interpolated Britney Spears on lead single "Lucky," and that one peaked at #88. The album didn't do much for me.

I can't really tell whether Halsey thought The Great Imitator was a commercial move or not. More likely, I think, they were just trying something, since nobody seems to know what works as a commercial move these days. Halsey played the game for a long time, and she lived out the messiest version of the pop-star vocation. Because of that, they'll always be a pop star, whether or not they ever make another proper hit. These days, though, we've got a new generation of pop stars acting out messiness on the grandest of stages, and some of them make better music than Halsey ever did. I wouldn't be shocked if Halsey scored a big comeback hit at some point, but I can't say I'm expecting it.

GRADE: 6/10

BONUS BEATS: As if to prove my thesis that "Without Me" would work better as a stripped down ballad, here's future Number Ones artist Lewis Capaldi singing a voice-and-piano version of the song in a 2019 SiriusXM session:

BONUS BONUS BEATS: At the extreme other end of the spectrum, here's the abrasively cartoonish "Without Me" remix that 100 gecs played at some kind of Minecraft event in 2019:

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Does it ever get lonely thinking you can liiiiiiiive without a copy? No? Well, buy one here anyway.