Halsey Debuts First Concert Film The Girl in the Tower
Halsey delivers a boundary-pushing performance in The Girl in the Tower, a 75-minute concert film capturing a career-spanning set across a European festival tour. Released on YouTube to mark the fifth anniversary of her album If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, the production showcases a sharp pivot from traditional pop stardom into gritty, high-octane rock.
Shedding Pop Stardom for a Hard-Rock Persona
For an artist who cemented her status a decade ago with massive radio tracks like “Closer,” “Bad at Love,” and “Without Me,” red carpets and awards shows never quite felt like home. Hanging out in New Jersey and Brooklyn left her feeling rough around the edges by mainstream pop standards. Halsey feels disconnected from that bygone label. Instead, the mantle of a rock star fits much better.
To capture this evolution, The Girl in the Tower compiles footage from multiple European tour stops, including a particularly raucous crowd at the Rock for People festival in the Czech Republic last June. The film embraces raw intensity, featuring sweat, blood, and tears across stages designed to tear down old pop preconceptions.
The Thematic Structure of the Tour Film
Splitting the live experience into four distinct chapters—The Mother, The Maiden, The Mage, and They’re Raging at Me—Halsey anchors the production with a spoken-word voiceover. The film opens with the lines: “The girl in the tower once cried out for hours, then planted a garden to pick herself flowers. But came summer’s poison, it turned the fruit sour. Her teeth met the flesh. She begins to devour.”
From there, the setlist pulls from a 14-year catalog. Tracks like “Nightmare” blaze alongside pyrotechnics, while a roaring rendition of “Castle” from her debut album Badlands required the festival crowd to restart the song entirely to match her energetic demands. During “Dog Years,” a selection from The Great Impersonator, she performs tethered to a thick chain leash before breaking away into aggressive crowd-pleasers like “Experiment on Me” and a heavy rock reworking of “Closer.”
Production Scale and the Business of Touring
Mounting an international festival run and transforming it into a cohesive visual artifact requires immense behind-the-scenes coordination. When artists orchestrate large-scale visual releases and complex touring schedules, the logistics extend far beyond the stage lights.
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