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Not every music artist can do shows so individualized that fans will be talking about the merits of a specific night years or decades later, the way that Deadheads or some jam-band aficionados do. But even a performer who skews toward the massive, highly produced side of modern pop can do a show that breaks with form enough to will go down in the annals of fandom as a you-should’ve-been-there moment. That was the kind of concert Halsey did to close out her 2025 road trip at the Yaamava’ Theater in Highland, Calif. — a kicky and riveting show that had her throwing out any rulebook from the rest of the tour and spending two-and-a-half hours flying by the seat of her babydoll dress.

“First of all, how many of you guys have been to another show on the tour?” asked Halsey, shortly into the final performance of her “For My Last Trick” tour Sunday night. The response sounded nearly unanimous: There were not a lot of first-timers in the 2,600-seat room. “OK, cool. This is incredible news and lemme tell you why,” she said — “because this show is gonna be absolutely nothing fucking like that at all. … I’m sure some of you guys noticed and were like, ‘That’s weird. She’s doing Yaamava’, she’s doing Hollywood Bowl. What the fuck is this?’ It’s confusing, right?”

Fans were maybe not quite as confused by the double-booking in (barely) the greater L.A. area as they were hopeful — optimistic that, by picking a smaller place to wrap up a tour, Halsey might have designs on something other than just doing the same show for fewer people at a scaled-up price. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Halsey did, in fact, have different designs on how to use that space, and her audience was right to be thrilled when it became increasingly apparent just how beautifully off-script this gig would go. This was the kind of show you’d wish every artist could provide their more hardcore fans, and themselves, every so often. It felt especially swell as a supplement to the elaborately conceived and expertly executed big production Halsey just wrapped up. But even if this was the only show of theirs you saw all year, it wouldn’t have felt any less special, or sensational.

If you listed all the ways a star performer can surprise an audience, Halsey ticked off most of those boxes in Highland. Premiering freshly written songs, for starters? She had two of those, in “Lucid” and “Carry the Weight,” both of them rocking power-pop bangers that could be highlights when they’ve become staples of the next era’s shows. Or how about giving live premieres to back-catalog numbers that had never been played in concert before? They had three of those, in “Hurt Feelings,” “I Believe in Magic” and “People Disappear Here,” none of them sounding like they’d deserved outcast status. On top of these, there were two more (“I’m Not Mad” and “The End”) that had only been played in concert once previously, in both instances in the last week or two. At the end of a tour, many artists understandably tend toward autopilot… and then you get somebody who decides this is just the time to try a Viking takeoff.

Lest this come off as completely random in comparison to Halsey’s earlier “For My Last Trick” shows (which were highly structured, albeit with wild card slots), there was a mechanism to some of the madness at the Yaamava’. This was one of a couple shows she was doing at the end of the tour in casinos, after the dancers and sets from the rest of the tour had been sent home or to a warehouse a few nights earlier. The singer designated these as “Dealer’s Choice” nights, where fans would be selected to come on stage and play oversized games of roulette, bingo, slots and so forth to determine a few of the more obscure numbers… and then she heavily signaled that the fans could cheat and pretend that the dice fell on a different tune, if fate didn’t select the one they’d wanted. Even when the mock-gaming generated an oldie that Halsey had never sung live before, it was sung impeccably, without visible aid from prompters — proving, once again, that nothing goes further in allowing spontaneity to flourish than oodles of preparation.

The aspect of the show that consisted of delighting day-one-ers with B-sides or world premieres could be considered not much more than an effective fan-service stunt. But that doesn’t get really get at the human factor of the night, which was major, and will last in memory quite a bit longer than which underheard bonus tracks finally got their moment. Part of that had to do with the fans that Halsey brought on (especially one we’ll get to later), and part of it was the liberty she gave herself to talk at length, to the point that it felt like an endearingly chummy one-woman show, even though there was never any losing sight of the three-piece band on high alert behind her. (It could have been an illusion, but it sounded as if the more conversational she got over the course of the 150 minutes, the more the singer’s New Jersey inflections came out; maybe having mom in the audience helped.)

“If you’ve seen my other shows, then you know that I’m a very serious person who takes my art very seriously. This is something else. I don’t know what this is,” she said. “Dealer’s Choice is a night where I am completely unhinged.” The hinge-less part may have been an exaggeration, for someone who’s likely as much of a control freak as Halsey. (“One thing about me, I’m always gonna think I’m in charge,” she admitted, catching herself doing some stage-directing in the wake of a fan’s medical emergency.) But the artist has an innate understanding that the most constructive way of wielding control can be using it to carve out moments where honest emotion is sure to be unleashed. And there were plenty of gratifying examples of that in Sunday’s show.

Halsey brought two musicians up front to sit with her for the acoustic concert debut of “I Believe in Magic,” one of the most tender and unguarded tracks from her latest album, 2024’s “The Great Impersonator,” a record that was already filled with a lot of introspection. It’s one of a number of tracks from that release that alludes or directly refers to her bouts with serious illnesses — lupus and leukemia, specifically — since the turn of the decade. This one in particular deals with belief and disbelief, mortality, being the child of an aging parent and having a child oneself. Heady, heartfelt stuff, to the point where you could see why “when I played it for my mom at like 7:00 in the morning — we were on the way to the airport — she started to cry and was like, ‘Ashley, what the fuck?’ She was so mad, and I thought she was gonna be like, ‘Oh, honey, this is beautiful.’ I don’t know why I thought that. Did I think I had a different mom all of a sudden. And she reacted exactly how she should have. … My mom was so incredibly vital in my life when I was sick and I was struggling as a single mom, and our relationship became better than it ever was. … Last summer, my mother got diagnosed with breast cancer and it was my turn to return the favor, and she is cancer free now and here at the show.”

The only other time in the show Halsey referred to motherhood was a much more amusing one. “We’re gonna bring up another game, and while they’re bringing it out, I’m gonna go get a drink,” the singer told the crowd… and as a couple of minutes passed, it probably became an unspoken agreement among the audience that no one was going to call her on her bullshit. Of course, she called herself when she came back. “In the interest of being honest, I wasn’t getting a drink. I had to pee — I just thought that wasn’t as sexy as being like, ‘I have to go get a drink because I’m cool. I party.’ I was literally about to pee my pants during ‘Closer.’ I had a baby, OK? But that’s literally the only thing that’s different, being up here, since that happened.”

The audience can testify: She does not bring strong mom vibes, 98% of the time. And that’s a good thing, when you have essentially reinvented your sound, to some extent, from being a pop singer to a rock ‘n’ roll queen. Should you feel the urge to make up a list of the best rock songs of the decade, Halsey ought to be turning up a lot, whether you’ve considered her for that ranking or not. Olivia Rodrigo is not the only rocker who masquerades as a popper, not when Halsey is doing songs as howling as “Lonely Is the Muse,” as good an expression of feminist rage as we’ve had on record any time in the past 10 years (even if it’s from the point of view of a woman who’s still a ways from having fully claimed her power). Halsey asked the audience to scream, then inevitably asked for a more honestly felt scream. “It felt better, didn’t it? I’m just trying to get you ready for the song that comes after this one,” which was “Nightmare,” that fantastic anthem for a generation of ladies who’ve been asked to smile once or a hundred times too often.

She’s so devoted to rocking out that the aforementioned “Closer” — her huge collaborative hit with the Chainsmokers — has actually been rearranged into something that is maybe more enduringly palatable. It, too, is now a rock highlight of the show, having shed a sound she profusely apologized for. “That song has been on such a journey and I really love it now,” they said. “I loved it then too. There was just little in-between times where I’d get into an Uber or go to a grocery store and think ‘I would really love to not hear my own grating voice,’ and just that…” She loudly imitated the signature riff, which was not always played on an electric guitar as it is now. “From a musical science perspective: incredible melody, great, very simple, very amazing. (But) as a person functioning in society, I’m so sorry we did that to you guys. I’m so sorry. It was psychological torture of some kind.”

That was Halsey’s way of redeeming a confectionary moment in her career. But not much she’s done lately in an increasingly sterling recording career has required a reframing. One of the best examples of how bold the artist has become in their songwriting is a song from the most recent album called “The End,” one of the rarer truly hopeful songs in her canon, which ironically comes out of frankly discussing her chronic illness, and the slow warming up that happens in meeting someone who seems up to the task of remaining a friend, or lover, through the dregs of ongoing medical treatment.

There’s a reason that quiet and revealing a number as “The End” wasn’t an obvious candidate to have shown up in the standard, high-concept version of this tour. And there was a reason she played it Sunday night: She invited out on stage someone she’d met with backstage earlier, a masked-up young woman who has been chronicling her bone marrow condition and who said, when she accepted the mic, “This is my last show. And it’s gonna be the best show yet.” Halsey had to agree: “It’s gonna be the best show yet,” she said, then sang face to face and personalized the poignant closing lines to include the fan’s name.

The dramatic part of the evening wasn’t over, as, a short time later, there was a collapse in the audience and Halsey stopped the show for some time while a medical team attended to and took out the stricken woman. When the affected song finally got a restart after an assurance that the person was OK, Halsey realized the irony of the song choice in question, saying, “I can’t believe that I’m about to restart a song called ‘People Disappear Here’…”

Halsey also couldn’t help pointing out the bizarre juxtaposition between that and the next song, acknowledging that she was following something indisputably heavy “with a switch into lesbians. It’s happened at least four times on the tour. Fuck it — it’s ‘Honey.'”

And it was sweet — another balls-out rocker (or actually, literally, a ball-less one), bringing some bonus glee in a night of both plotted and unplanned catharses. Halsey fans who were on hand will have every right to consider it a peak moment in their concert-going experiences; “the best show yet” wasn’t something that just needed to be said to a girl who is facing the possibility of dying, but more of a shared sentiment.

In any case, this may not be a repeatable phenomenon, among other artists who can’t put on a roller coaster of a concert like this one, because they don’t have a catalog to draw upon that encompasses everything from sensual delights to chronic sickness. But even for performers who don’t have quite the same breadth as Halsey’s, this was the kind of show to make you want to ask everyone else: Could you just try to break from routine and pull off a one-off this good, once in a while? Even the fans that have to live with the FOMO of not getting in will hear about it and thank you.

Halsey setlist, Yaamava’ Resort, July 6, 2025:

3am
Bad at Love
Panic Attack
Hold Me Down
Colors
Gasoline
Don’t Play
Heaven in Hiding
Lie
Lucid (unreleased song)
You Should Be Sad
Closer (rock version)
I’m Not Mad (performed second time ever)
I Believe in Magic (live debut)
Graveyard
Carry the Weight (unreleased song)
Hurt Feelings (live debut)
The End (performed second time ever)
Honey
Easier Than Lying
I Am Not a Woman, I’m a God
People Disappear Here (live debut)
Lonely Is the Muse
Nightmare
Without Me