Singer Halsey and music critic Anthony Fantano, known on YouTube as theneedledrop, traded verbal barbs online over Fantano’s review and rating of the singer’s 2024 album The Great Impersonator. In his review posted on his YouTube channel in October 2024, Fantano gave the album a “light to decent 1,” accusing the record of having the “worst cases of main character syndrome” on any pop album in 2024.
For those uninformed, Anthony Fantano has been gaining popularity in online pop spaces due to his recent interview with Olivia Rodrigo following the release of her third album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. On June 21, X account @NotRealMusic called back on Fantano’s rating of The Great Impersonator, saying they didn’t understand “how there’s still discourse about it all this time later.” Fantano quote-tweeted the X post and added:
“If they’re more into the review than the album.”
This seemingly rubbed Halsey the wrong way, and the singer, who uses she/they pronouns, responded to Fantano’s tweet, saying her “least memorable song” will be “remembered more fondly” than anything the music critic would ever do with his life. They also referenced undergoing chemotherapy while working on the album, writing:
“I’m certain my least memorable song will be remembered more fondly and for more time than anything you ever do with your life will be. Everything you say is more “whiny” and “edgy” than I was at any point on that album. But at least I had the excuse of going through chemo.”
In another X post, Halsey suggested she didn’t care about the bad review and claimed her concern was that a “pay for clicks reaction YouTuber can facade as a pro critic and say it’s “main character syndrome” for an artist to lament her medical suffering on an album.”
In another X post, Halsey addressed the reality of being a woman with serious health issues, saying it often resulted in “being afraid of telling the truth about the pain you’re in because you’re afraid of not being believed or seeming attention seeking” and accused Anthony Fantano of validating “that fear to thousands of women.”
While Anthony Fantano did not directly respond to Halsey’s tweets, he replied to an X post claiming that The Great Impersonator would be “more remembered than anything you have ever done in your pathetic, miserable life,” writing:
“prove it by mentioning it more than the review didn’t even say the title btw.”
More details on Anthony Fantano’s review of Halsey’s The Great Impersonator
Halsey’s The Great Impersonator was released in October 2024 and was written over the span of two years during which the singer battled chronic health conditions like a rare T-cell lymphoproliferative disorder and lupus, while parenting their son, and dealing with a breakup from their baby’s father. The 18-track album debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and received mixed reviews, with Pitchfork rating it 4.8/10 and Rolling Stone 4/5 stars.
In Anthony Fantano’s written review of the album, the music critic suggested that all the songs on The Great Impersonator sounded like “it’s being written from the perspective of some troubled girl character from those shows,” adding that the album had “multiple indulgent cuts that sound like messy demos and just would not make it onto a more respectable release that was actually well conceptualized.”
“Also all of the lyrics on this record where it seems like Halsey is just hell-bent on making sure the audience knows just how dark and tortured and edgy she is. “Well they say all dogs go to heaven / Well what about a b***h? / What about an evil girl left lying in a ditch?” Jesus Christ,” Fantano wrote.
He continued:
“Again, it feels like she’s bringing back so many ideas and elements from just very angsty rock music that came out of the ’90s/2000s, but she is not allowing us to remember the stuff that made that music great or what made it popular in the first place. She’s only holding onto the stuff that ended up being its downfall, the elements of it that aged the worst.”
In other news, Anthony Fantano’s interview with Olivia Rodrigo came out on June 20, 2026.
Edited by Juhi Marzia