“Long story short, I’m lucky to be alive,” are the words Halsey chose to introduce his fifth studio album, “The Great Impersonator”.

Born Ashley Frangipane, the pop singer who uses she/the pronouns shared the note on Instagram in June, and later revealed that she had been privately battling both a form of lupus and a rare lymphoproliferative T-cell disease since 2022. “The Great Impersonator,” out Friday, chronicles that time, made within the race of survival. And it wasn’t just health crises and treatment that threatened their well-being: In the past two years, she’s also been removed from her longtime label and separated from the father of their son.

In some ways, “The Great Impersonator” is an artifact of someone who isn’t sure they’ll live to make another record. It’s full of reflection, from the early days of her career, the whirlwind that followed and the existential wisdom that comes with cutting it close to death.

It may therefore seem ironic that on this album she – who feels like an artist trying to get to the core of their inner selves – has chosen to compose songs that draw directly from her greatest inspirations. Each song is a kind of imitation of another artist, filtered through her own songwriting style. But that’s exactly the point: Halsey has been a chameleon throughout her career, an Internet-age forerunner of genre-bending alt-pop. What is truest to them may well be an album of impressions.

It’s a return to both the music that made Halsey a teen star all those years ago and the influences previously hidden from their work. In the first mentioned category there is interpolation of Britney Spears on “Lucky,” the shoegaze-meets-now-metal “Lonely is the Muse,” there Deftones and Evanescence can be heard in equal measure, the pop-punk, Third Eye Blind-esque “Ego” and the folksy “The End”.

Elsewhere there are big-hearted, reverbed Bruce Springsteen channeling “Letter to God (1983),” lest anyone forget that Halsey is from New Jersey. Sonically, “Hometown” is Halsey’s cursive singing vintage Dolly Parton; “Arsonist”, a near parody of Fiona Apple. “Panic Attack” pulls a Stevie Nicks, while the title track is her tribute to Björk.

“The Great Impersonator” is also about an artist who corrects his relationship with fame and, by extension, career. Halsey’s blockbuster pop singles seem a thing of the past, a necessary sacrifice to make the most interesting work of her career. Her last album, 2021 “If I can’t have love, I want power” saw Halsey team up with Nine Inch Nails Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for an industrial concept of motherhood and the Freudian “Madonna-whore complex”. It is her most ambitious work, and what she has recently called her least commercially successful release. “The Great Impersonator” is aware of that legacy, and instead of trying to reclaim traditional markers of achievement, he’s banking on them.

On the opening track, “Only Living Girl in LA,” Halsey offers both brutal honesty and crippling satire: “I don’t know if I could sell out my own funeral (Ah-ah) / At least not at this point.” Near the end, the folksy opener bursts into explosive distortion – something that could be right at home on an Alex G record, he is one of this album’s producers, along with Michael Uzowuru, known for his work with SZA, Frank Ocean, FKA Twigs, Beyonce and more.

But these collaborators are only part of “The Great Impersonator,” of course, an album that feels most faithful to Halsey — oddly enough, arriving at a moment where she’s made herself the least accessible she’s ever been to the public. It’s an ambitious, contemplative album—self-involved and hyper-referential—perhaps the best record yet of the man behind the moniker.