The lineup: Ashley Nicolette Frangipane (vocals).  The background: We were going to say Halsey – an acronym of Ashley, her real name – is going to be massive, but she kind of already is. The 20-year-old’s debut album, Badlands, is No 2 on the US iTunes chart, behind The Weeknd. It’s No 1 on iTunes in 18 countries, and it’s looking set to enter high in the UK’s top 10 today (Friday 4 September). She was the most tweeted about artist at this year’s SXSW (ahead of Miley Cyrus), her scheduled shows in London on 10 and 11 September sold out in five minutes, and apparently she caused a riot outside Radio 1. Imagine all the furore and excitement at the emergence of Lorde and Lana Del Rey, only concentrated and amplified.  Much like someone else from New Jersey, she did it her way. She’s not the first to build an ardent following (early articles talk in terms of an army of obsessive fans, not passive consumers) using social media, but it’s her facility with Twitter, Soundcloud et al that is so impressive. “I come from a generation where these huge follower counts are normal,” she told the New York Times, who described her as not just “preternaturally self-possessed” but “fluent in the language of modern marketing”. She added that her “interaction levels” – retweets, replies and click-throughs – were “incredibly high”.  There’s a narrative here of female empowerment and a patina of rebellion that is easily commodified, but for once it’s the chain-smoking artist herself who is doing the issuing and packaging, to paraphrase a generational leader from another time, another place. The child of a white mother and black father, she identifies as “tri-bi” – biracial, bisexual and bipolar – and pens rallying cries that sometimes seem entirely composed of slogans designed to inflame the enchanted mini-me’s, all dyed hair and black lipstick, who hang on her every word. “High on legal marijuana/Raised on Biggie and Nirvana/We are the new Americana,” she sings on New Americana, from Badlands, which may well end up meaning as much to her demographic as “Here we are now, entertain us/I feel stupid and contagious” meant to a previous one. The album comprises track after track of slow, brooding, glacial electro-pop with tinges of throbbing, industrialised R&B showcasing an outsider persona, delivered by a sensual sob whose very timbre bespeaks 2015 and its attendant hang-ups and travails.  Not musically but in terms of attitude and marketplace positioning, more than anyone she reminds us of a latterday Alanis Morissette, whose Jagged Little Pill is about to be reissued 20 years on. In 1995, Morissette was the high-street, made-to-measure “bad girl”, with one hand in her pocket and the other flicking a cigarette, the post-grunge girl making Courtney Love’s uncontainable rage palatable for the masses. And that appears to be the space Halsey is about to fill, only she’s doing it in reverse: she’s a roughed-up, edgy, troubled version of someone like Taylor Swift: “I’m meaner than my demons,” as she sings on Control. She writes songs “about sex and being sad”, as she puts it – Ghost is a fabulously forlorn dissection of a dead affair – but she’s canny enough to make them (with the help of a series of producers) just commercial enough, even as she declares that her favourite thing about them is that “none of them are hits – I call Badlands ‘anti-pop’”. Some commenters find her resistibly contrived and overly calculating, but we applaud Halsey and her on-point requiems to teen ennui.  The buzz: “Fans of Lorde will find the glacial electro-pop atmosphere familiar and comforting.”  The truth: What it all comes down to is that everything’s gonna be quite all right for Halsey.  Most likely to: Make a killing.  Least likely to: Go on a killing spree across America.  What to buy: Badlands is out now.  File next to: Lorde, Banks, Lana Del Rey, Alessia Cara.  Ones to watch: Eryn Allen Kane, Tempers, Snøskred, Grace, Blizzard.
She’s the new superstar-in-waiting, dividing the critics – but amassing an army of believers – with her powerful yet sorrowful pop-R&B