Halsey echoes Britney Spears with "Lucky," but it might as well be a cover

This week’s freshest hits are a blast from the past. On the same day Ice Spice released her debut album Y2K, Halsey dropped a new single and video “Lucky” mining that very same aesthetic. Directed by Gia Coppola, Halsey plays a pop princess in the 2000s mold. But, surprise, there’s something deeper going on underneath the surface. To really hammer both the aesthetic and the themes home, the interpolates “Angel Of Mine” (originally released by Eternal and popularized by Monica in 1998) and shares a chorus with Britney Spears’ 2000 hit “Lucky.” 

In the video—which, as expected, is gorgeously shot—a young girl’s ordinary life is juxtaposed with her idol’s, played by a pink-haired Halsey. Both girls are stuck within their circumstances. Though Halsey’s circumstances are more glamorous on the surface, she’s got issues with her romantic life and, most significantly, with her health; prior to releasing the song, the singer revealed that she’d been diagnosed with Lupus SLE. “I shaved my head four times because I wanted to and then I did it one more time cause I got sick,” she sings. “I thought I changed so much nobody would notice shit, and no one did. Then I left the doctor’s office full of tears / Became a single mom at my premiere / I told everybody I was fine for a whole damn year, and that’s the biggest lie of my career.”

Lyrically and thematically, “Lucky” isn’t much different from the first song Halsey released from her upcoming album, a track called “The End.” Both songs touch on her troubled childhood, tumultuous love life, and the effect of her diagnosis. It’s also, obviously, thematically similar to “Lucky” by Britney Spears. Halsey’s has a little more grit and edge than Spears was allowed back in 2000 (“And why she losin’ so much weight?/I heard it’s from the drugs she ate/And I feel her, but I can’t relate,” Halsey sings). Though the confessional style of the song is indeed emotional, it doesn’t do the song any favors to retread such familiar ground. At a certain point, you might wonder, why not just perform a straight cover of “Lucky”?

The answer is that when the song works best, it’s a call-and-response between Spears and Halsey. “When I was 5, it always felt like Britney was singing directly to me,” Halsey wrote on Instagram in the lead-up to the song’s release. “24 years later, these words hit different. love you forever.” As depicted in the video, Halsey was once the young girl looking up to an idol who was struggling behind the scenes, and now she’s on the other side of the equation for a new age. Poignant though that may be, the cycle of pop stardom toxicity doesn’t really justify the existence of a new “Lucky.” Following the innovative collaborations with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on 2021’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, “Lucky” feels like a step backward. Hopefully, the rawness of this new project is better served elsewhere on her new album.