‘Gasoline’: The Story Behind Halsey’s ‘Badlands’ Classic
The ‘BADLANDS’ deluxe bonus track captured the singer facing a moment of existential doubt.
Despite being left off the first edition of BADLANDS, Halsey‘s “Gasoline” has proven to be one of the album’s most enduring tracks.
Written by Halsey and BADLANDS producer Lido, the downcast electropop cut initially surfaced on the deluxe edition of Halsey’s debut album, which came out August 28, 2015. Mirroring BADLANDS’ use of a fictional dystopian society surrounded by desert wasteland as a metaphor for the singer’s experience with mental health, “Gasoline” was a reference to Halsey’s own experiences with bipolar disorder, which she was diagnosed with at 17.
Though Halsey has since gone on to have a family of her own (she gave birth to son Ender Ridley Aydin in 2021), BADLANDS and “Gasoline” captured the singer facing a moment of existential doubt around her diagnosis. In 2015, she said: “You wonder things like, ‘Am I ever going to be able to be a mom?’ I never wanted to be a cop, but now that’s something I can never be. I can’t carry a weapon…. Knowing that I couldn’t do something because of this, even though it wasn’t directly crippling me, was horrifying.”
“It’s just what I thought the record was missing,” Halsey also said, describing “Gasoline” in 2015. “It was almost like a synopsis for the album and it’s a very self-aware track. It’s right there on the deluxe edition. I’m really interested in people to have the deluxe edition of the record because I just wish that it was the proper version of the album, but obviously for time and space purposes I couldn’t put out an 18-track album.”
Despite its later addition to BADLANDS, “Gasoline” ended up resonating strongly with Halsey’s audience, so much so that it has become the album’s most-streamed track on Spotify. And six years after its release, Halsey paid homage to “Gasoline” with an updated version of the track on the Target exclusive edition of her fourth studio album If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power (2021). Echoing the new album’s industrial aesthetic (provided by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails), “Gasoline (Reimagined)” layered in snarling guitar solos, a spikier electronic drumbeat, and Halsey’s growling vocal.
As Halsey celebrates the 10th anniversary of BADLANDS’ with a variety of releases, the singer once again expanded “Gasoline”’s decade-spanning legacy – this time with a new music video that continues the song’s journey.
Order the 10th anniversary editions of Halsey’s BADLANDS now.
