After amassing tens of thousands of YouTube followers as a teenager and signing to dance-music label Astralwerks at age 18, Halsey has steadily built her pop profile over the last year: dropping a strong-selling album late last summer, earning admiring reviews for her Lorde-meets–Lana Del Rey cerebral pop, and drawing buzz for her foul-mouthed cover of Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself.” (She sang it uncensored, with the word songwriter Ed Sheeran actually meant for “love” intact.) But to date, Halsey hasn’t been a big hitmaker. Perhaps Halsey is the X-factor? The singer born Ashley Nicolette Frangipane in New Jersey in 1994 has been positioned as a rising star for some time now. Timing aside, it’s fair to ask how a musical Polaroid this minimalist-seriously, those synths on the verses sound like the preset on a 1982 Casio keyboard-scaled the charts so fast. The chorus finally builds to a piercing, desperate mantra: “ We ain’t never getting older/ No, we ain’t never getting older.” In essence, this cannily timed song-dropped in late July and topping the charts in late August, in time for back to school and the moment when America’s Danny Zukos recall their Sandy Olssons-is Don Henley’s “ The Boys of Summer” for the age of Snapchat. (Better that than a hotel lobby, which as we all know leads to moral turpitude.) This is a hit song in 2016, so of course the pair are eager for a sweaty hookup-each sings, “I can’t stop/ No, I can’t stop,” and by the chorus they’re in the “backseat of your Rover … Bit that tattoo on your shoulder.” But it’s the song’s asides that color in the sincere melancholy of the romance: “I know you can’t afford” the aforementioned Range Rover, the singer notes, adding that they should take their coupling to “the mattress that you stole/ From your roommate back in Boulder.” With these details the vocalist manages to both dress down the paramour and warmly recall their earlier, ramen-for-dinner–era romance.
The song’s protagonists are a guy and gal four years out from a short-lived romance, now re-encountering each other in a hotel bar. Even in a year where it seems every other hit is oddly wistful, “Closer” stands out for its tone of small-scale regret writ large. Her yearning vocal deepens “Closer’s” brooding ambiance. Assisting the dudes in their emotional rescue is featured singer Halsey, who duets on the track with Taggart, the Chainsmokers’ primary songwriter.
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