# @popbase on Instagram

- **Type:** Video
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DaoNusJhLMq
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/67687920-popbase-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/233e40caed.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-07-10T22:00:00.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Pop Base (@PopBase) — https://gondola.cc/PopBase

## Caption

11 years ago today, Halsey released 'New Americana.'

Serving as the second single from her debut album Badlands, though the track actually began life a year earlier — she'd quietly uploaded an original version to SoundCloud in March 2014, letting it build organic buzz before its official rollout. Halsey penned it with Larzz Principato and Kalkutta, while Norwegian producer Lido, who also executive-produced the whole album, shaped its electropop sound, which folds in an interpolation of Mtume's 1983 classic "Juicy Fruit" and layered, Pink Floyd-esque vocal harmonies on the chorus.

The song was built as satire — a critique of pop culture dressed up as a massive pop anthem — with lines pairing "legal marijuana" against Biggie and Nirvana to capture a generation raised on cultural contradictions and shifting norms around things like same-sex marriage. Halsey has said she found it maddening when listeners took the lyrics at face value rather than recognizing the irony, and years later she'd controversially call it her least favorite song and drop it from her live sets entirely. Even so, critics at outlets like Billboard, USA Today, and The New York Times tagged it a defining "generational anthem" for millennials, while Pitchfork was far more skeptical, dismissing its chorus as hollow. Its music video, released that September, depicted Halsey as the reluctant leader of a dystopian community — tied into the Badlands album's fictional concept — captured by soldiers and nearly burned before being rescued, ending on a segue into the following track, "Drive."

Commercially, 'New Americana' became Halsey's first-ever Billboard Hot 100 entry, eventually peaking at number 60, and it's since been certified 2x Multi-Platinum by the RIAA along with Gold status in Australia. It helped anchor Badlands, which debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 and went on to sell millions worldwide, cementing Halsey as one of the decade's defining alt-pop voices; a decade later, in 2025, the album got a full 10th-anniversary vinyl reissue and companion tour, with "New Americana" still remembered as the song that helped launch her into the mainstream.

#halsey #popculture

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## Tags

popculture, halsey

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