In “Without Me,” Halsey sings, “Said I’d catch you if you fall. And if they laugh, then fuck ’em all.” It marks a pivotal moment in her career: After her breakup with G-Eazy, she felt immense pressure to comment publicly because she’d been so transparent about her life in the past. She thought to herself, So how are you going to do it? Are you going to stream live and start talking about everything? Are you going to go on a Twitter rant? Are you going to flag off on him on TMZ? Or are you going to make a song? “The biggest lesson I learned was to make art, not headlines,” she says. “Because it can become quite easy, in the social media generation, to go from being a musician to becoming a personality.”

“Without Me” is about caring for someone so much that you lose sight of yourself, Halsey explains. “I call myself a collector; I collect things from people and use them to widen my artistic repertoire, so that I am writing from a culmination of experiences from the world,” she says. “But I’m an imitator as well, because I’m so passionately putting myself in other people’s shoes all the time.” Being a chameleon is not always a good thing, she admits. “I beat myself up for a long time,” she says. “I was like, You’re fucking spineless. Why do you have to become everyone you’re around? Why do you have to imitate all of their interests, all of their fucking mannerisms, and their personality? Why can’t you just know who the fuck you are and be strong in that? But I realized that will never happen. So instead I started surrounding myself with people I admire and really like.”

And perhaps those people are helping her find herself. “Without Me” is the most exposed Halsey’s ever been; unlike her previous songs, it’s not part of a concept album with a fantasy narrative that she can hide her true intentions behind. The vulnerability is paying off—the track is her biggest hit to date and makes use of the lower, huskier registers of Halsey’s voice, which somehow sound wounded, angry, wistful, and defiant at the same time. Along with Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next,” it’s paving the way for a new generation of empowered female pop stars who are taking control of their narratives, unspooling the darkness in their personal lives, and emerging with empowering, unfiltered masterpieces.

The two songs might be fighting neck-and-neck for the number one spot on the charts, but Halsey says she doesn’t buy into the narrative of competition between her and Grande. “We live in a world where women are required to be so fucking original, it’s crazy,” she says. “There are so many male artists who are regurgitations of each other: They all fucking dress the same, they all have the same stylist, they all wear the same fucking clothes, they write with the same writers.”

Her voice rises passionately as she continues, “I will say one thing about my generation of artists: We are just not fucking having it. Lorde, Ariana…if you open any of our text messages at any given time, all of us are just like, ‘Yo, I love your new record. When are you leaving for tour?’ We’re so supportive.”

Our allotted time together is coming to an end and we realize we’ve been walking in circles, unable to find the exit. “We could just be bougie and call my driver,” Halsey suggests. Moments later a black SUV arrives to pick us up. Halsey slides into the back seat, humming a tune under her breath. I ask her whether her next album will continue the trajectory she’s set with “Without Me.” “When you’re 19 the only thing you care about is how the world revolves around you. When you’re 25 the only thing you care about is how the world revolves in general,” she says. “I’ve written a lot of inward music so far—it‘s been a reflection of me, my mental health, my experience. Then as my voice and my problems started to grow, it was like, OK, I can put this into my art. I think moving forward into this [next] record, it will be more outwardly existential, as opposed to introspective.”

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