Review: Halsey tries to control her ‘Ego’ on new single

POP/ROCK

Halsey, “Ego”

Halsey embraces an angsty pop-rock sound on “Ego,” a single from “The Great Impersonator,” a new album that arrives Oct. 25. As the musician chronicles the dizzying and alienating effects of fame, flashes of Natalie Imbruglia and Ashlee Simpson (a compliment!) give the song a satisfyingly nostalgic feel. “I think that I should try to kill my ego,” an impassioned Halsey sings on the infectious chorus, “because if I don’t, my ego might kill me.”

LINDSAY ZOLADZ, New York Times

Linkin Park, “The Emptiness Machine”

Emily Armstrong of the hard rock band Dead Sara was announced last week as a new vocalist in Linkin Park. She introduces herself on “The Emptiness Machine,” the first single from the rock veterans’ upcoming eighth album, “From Zero.” Stepping into the role of the group’s powerhouse singer Chester Bennington, who died in 2017, Armstrong certainly has big shoes to fill. But, as she proves on this bombastic new track, Armstrong shares Bennington’s facility in pivoting between melodic belting and throat-shredding screams. The song itself doesn’t cover much new ground, but maybe that’s the point: It suggests that, seven years after Bennington’s death, the rest of the band is now ready to carry on as closely as possible to the way it was before.

LINDSAY ZOLADZ, New York Times

“You can put your clothes back on, she’s leaving you”: How’s that for an opening line? The lead single from “Manning Fireworks” expertly blends pathos and bleak humor, tracing the aftermath of a breakup that also sounds like a midlife crisis: “Go rent a Ferrari, and sing the blues/Believe that Clapton was the second coming.” But Lenderman somehow turns this chronicle of almost achingly banal male behavior into a bona fide anthem, complete with a fist-pumping chorus and a killer guitar solo. In the final moments, the song is reduced to just the plaintive backing vocals of the Wednesday frontwoman Karly Hartzman singing, “She’s leaving you” — which becomes even more poignant if you know that she and Lenderman used to be a couple.

LINDSAY ZOLADZ, New York Times

The The, “Cognitive Dissident”

Songwriter Matt Johnson’s outlook hasn’t exactly brightened up in the 24 years since his last studio album leading The The. From the 1980s until its 2000 album, “Naked Self,” The The gave Johnson’s bleak tidings all sorts of backdrops: guitars, synthesizers, smoldering noise. In “Cognitive Dissident,” which opens the group’s new album, “Ensoulment,” he describes an Orwellian present — “Truth stands on the gallows, lies sit on the throne/Something in the shadows communicates by code” — amid insistently syncopated percussion and echoey, descending guitars, expecting no escape.

JON PARELES, New York Times

• Miranda Lambert, “Postcards From Texas”

• Snow Patrol, “The Forest Is the Path”

• Suki Waterhouse, “Memoir of a Sparklemuffin”

• Nick Lowe, “Indoor Safari”