Ashley Nicolette Frangipane (born September 29, 1994), known professionally as Halsey, is an American singer and songwriter. Gaining attention from self-released music on social media platforms, she was signed by Astralwerks in 2014 and released her debut EP, Room 93, later that year.
Halsey has since earned one number-one album on the Billboard 200 with Hopeless Fountain Kingdom (2017), as well as two number-two albums with Badlands (2015) and Manic (2020). She has earned two number-one singles on the Billboard Hot 100, including "Closer", a collaboration with The Chainsmokers, and "Without Me"; she has also attained a top-five single with "Bad at Love". In total, Halsey has sold over one million albums and has been streamed over six billion times in the United States. All three of her studio albums have been supported by a headlining tour.
Frangipane started writing music when she was 17, and in 2012 she began posting videos to social media sites such as YouTube and Kik, and in particular Tumblr, under the username of se7enteenblack. She became known for a parody of Taylor Swift's song "I Knew You Were Trouble", inspired by Swift's relationship with Harry Styles. She then wrote a follow up song about their relationship which was posted online in early 2013. In early 2014, Frangipane went to a party and met a "music guy" who asked her to collaborate on a song with him because he liked her voice. The result, a song about her ex-boyfriend titled "Ghost", was posted by Frangipane on SoundCloud several weeks after it was recorded. Within hours, the song gained online popularity, and she was subsequently contacted by several record labels, with the song eventually charting and going on radio. She signed with Astralwerks, feeling that they gave her more creative freedom than other labels that contacted her.
Following this, Frangipane played numerous acoustic shows in different cities under several stage names. She chose Halsey as her permanent stage name because it is an anagram of her first name, and is also a reference to the Halsey Street station of the New York City Subway in Brooklyn, a place she spent a lot of time at when she was a teenager. She also stated Halsey was the most popular name she used. Having written poems for years, Halsey began writing more serious songs as a way to promote them. Music became Halsey's "confessional approach" and a form of therapy after the difficult life she had endured.