Seven months after the release of her smash hit, “Without Me,” and almost two years after the release of her previous album, Hopeless Fountain Kingdom, Halsey came crashing in with her new song “Nightmare," just as the world needed it the most. Before dropping a curtain at her Webster Hall show in early May revealing the release date of “Nightmare," she completely blacked out her Instagram, leaving fans shocked. After announcing the single at her Webster Hall show in New York, she proceeded to tease fans by posting screencaps from the video that would later be released and responding to tweets hinting that the song would be an angry girl anthem.
Halsey comes into this song angry and with a message. With the amount of power and anger that this song contains, you can tell that Halsey means every single word she says in this song. She knew what she was doing by releasing the song just a few days after the anti-abortion law was proposed in Alabama. She responded with powerful lyrics such as “I’ve been polite but won’t be caught dead letting a man tell me what I should do with my bed” and made her thoughts very clear on this subject by also projecting the words “Your Body Your Choice” above her during her debut performance of the song. Halsey has never been an artist that will just sit back and keep her mouth shut about important issues, she always stands up for what she believes in and she does not do it silently. Instead, she screams it from rooftops.
The theme of feminism is very dominant in this song as well. Halsey is angry at the treatment of women and their rights and she responds to this with lyrics such as “I’m tired and angry but somebody should be” and “I’ve waited a while for a moment to say I don’t owe you a Goddamn thing," which personally gave me goosebumps. The video for “Nightmare” is cast completely of women and even features appearances by Lauren Jauregui and Cara Delivigne. She responds to society very directly in the video in ways such as having a protest where women are holding signs with sayings such as “Not your bitch."
In this song, Halsey reflects on her strength and how much she has grown and prevailed. The line “I keep a record of the wreckage of my life” refers to her previous albums, but mainly to her first album, Badlands. She reflects on how strong she is and how she has prevailed through so much with the lyric “starred in the mirror and punched it to shatters, collected the pieces and picked out a dagger." This shows how she has been through so much and life has thrown a lot at her but she is not going to just lay down and bleed, she is going to pick out a dagger and fight back.
Nightmare truly shows how angry Halsey is and how tired she is of how herself, and others, are being treated. She came for blood with this song and as she says, “it is sweet." In my opinion, this is one of the most powerful songs to be released in a very long time. Halsey always does amazing of standing up for who and what she believes in.
Written by Emily!
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