Halsey Releases Music Video For ‘New Americana’

Halsey has emerged herself in a dystopian world in her new music video for “New Americana.” The video looks like something out of Hunger Games or Divergent, depending on which movie series you prefer.

Halsey is showing a different side of herself in her new music video. She proves that she is someone who cannot be messed with, especially in the pop world. Halsey released the video to her latest single on Friday, Sept. 25, at 7:10 p.m. EST as promised. Just a day before she released her new video, she took to Instagram to share an exclusive trailer on her Instagram page and other social media accounts.

“New American” is the third single off the singer’s debut album, Badlands, which shows Halsey as a leader of a dystopian land filled with rebellious kids around her age. The video opens up with Halsey explaining, “We’re a community. They made me leader when I never asked. We were hopeful we would win because nothing could scare us, we feared no city, and we feared no man.”

The new video is directed by Jodeb. It shows Halsey wearing a fierce black military outfit and blue pixie hair as she hangs out with a group of young adults. They’re all seen smoking marijuana and making out with each other. In the song, Halsey even sings, “We are the New Americana, high on legal marijuana.”

Then to their surprise, a group of men with machine guns breaks in and kidnaps Halsey and attempts to torture her. She’s seen being doused with gasoline in an attempt to be burned alive. But her faithful followers come to her rescue and they all escape, as they’re seen running in slow motion. Halsey is seen looking back at the dystopian city as she smiles since she’s finally free.

Halsey previously explained the meaning of “New Americana” to MTV News. She said that it’s about kids who are open to the idea of pop culture taking over the world.

“It’s this idea of these kids who are part of a generation where pop culture is so heavily influential that diversity doesn’t scare them the way it scared our parents and their parents. We’re more accepting of different walks of life. So I think the ‘New Americana’ is racially ambiguous, people who are proud of their culture and they own it, possibly not from a binary of gender.”

Before she became a chart-topping artist, Halsey was a huge fan of other artists. She remembers the time when she listened to different artists on the radio who stood out to her at monumental time in her life. Halsey told Alice 97.3 that she hopes her music makes the same kind of impact on her fans, no matter where they hear her songs. She wants to make honest and raw music that not only her fans can relate to, but so they understand where she’s coming from.

“To have something like that on the radio is scary, but I look back to the soundtrack of my life, and having radio playing and thinking about driving home from my friends’ prom or driving home from a funeral or being in the kitchen cooking with my grandmother, all these moments where I’ve had the radio on, and I thought about all these artists that have become part of the homeostasis of my life, whether I knew it or not, ’cause they were background noise. But I remember that.”

Halsey adds that hearing her music on the radio or hearing people say they love her music is still a strange thing for her to comprehend.

And before her music started taking over the radio and online streaming sites, Halsey was a One Direction fan who wrote about Harry Styles and Taylor Swift’s relationship. The singer, whose real name is Ashley Frangipane, owned a private blog on Tumblr that was discovered by one of her fans. She even wrote a few songs in 2012-13 that talked about her distaste for everything “Haylor.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehnEkmUTqyI

One of her old songs have also been discovered and uploaded to YouTube. Even though Halsey is no longer writing about One Direction, that doesn’t mean she’s no longer a fan. Back in late July, she took to Twitter to share her support for their new single “Drag Me Down.”

YO DRAG ME DOWN IS SO TIGHT

— HALSEY (@halsey) July 31, 2015

What are your thoughts on Halsey’s new video for “New Americana”? Share your thoughts below in the comments section.

[Image: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images]