Manic revels in the explorative genre-pop bombast, letting the delicates twinkle, and the snarls bare their teeth; yet it's the soul that shines dominantly. It's her most complete work to date.
It is pop and sentimental, a cohesively varied ride that gives listeners plenty of singles to pluck out based on their own slice of creative madness.
Over 16 tracks, Manic is a chaotic amalgamation of self-analysis, rage, depression, ecstasy, and growth that sees its creator managing the messiness of fame while trying to stay true to herself.
The album finds a way to weave together multiple emotions, sounds, and genres and shows off Frangipane’s versatility as an artist while still acting as an incredibly cohesive and seamless album.
Manic is about the here-and-now real world and her fight for a place in it as a young woman.
Her openness and lyrical specificity make listening to the 25-year-old’s dramatic third album feel like reading someone else’s diary.
By stripping back the stories to their very personal core, Halsey has made a record that is as thrilling as it is vulnerable, and her best effort yet.
Manic is her most personal album to date ... It's haunting, heartbreaking and breathtakingly beautiful.
Manic is indeed an appropriate name for an album so filled with twists and turns it feels like a double-LP crammed into the course of a 47-minute record.
It all adds up to a very enjoyable record, one that fits in well with the current pop landscape while also working beyond it.
Even at its most erratic, the album is tied together by Halsey’s distinctive voice – sweet, tight-throated, and with something almost digitised about it, though the big, undisguised breaths she sometimes takes contradict that.
Halsey is less a pop chameleon than a musical magpie and Manic is a pristinely produced album that sounds a bit like everything you know, but better.
Freighted with unflinching lyrics, Manic is a magnificent - and magnificently raw - pop confessional.
Manic is an imperfect collection of tracks - with high peaks of sheer genius along with the low falls - but it still manages to fill eyes with tears, hearts with love and minds with thoughts as it explores the life and times of a 25-year-old in startling, stark detail.
Manic is a refreshingly intimate portrait of a young woman navigating fame, femininity, and mental illness—among other things.
Manic is a rich and often confounding listen, an expansive album filled to the brim with the imagined worlds Halsey’s built for herself in the real one.
Sadly, some of the album’s most compelling moments are overpowered by the tedium of modern pop.
Her intentions are always loud and clear, but too often the music doesn’t live up to them.
Musically, it’s all so calculatedly quirky that you almost wonder if Pee-wee Herman wasn’t called in as a consultant.
There are some good moments here, but even the best of them can’t help Halsey get out of her own way.
Instead of silencing those who insist she lacks identity, Halsey becomes lost in a sea of superstar guest performances and crisp production, falling short of her lofty ambitions.
#4 | / | The Music |
#8 | / | Good Morning America |
#18 | / | Billboard |
#25 | / | Rolling Stone |
#28 | / | Slant Magazine |
#40 | / | NME |
#43 | / | musicOMH |
#45 | / | The Young Folks |
#50 | / | Idolator |
#53 | / | The Alternative |