Not this album, sorry guys.” The song Halsey is most excited for their child to grow up and hear. People that are like the marketing scoop, how can we angle this in a marketable way? Where’s the commercial with the woman running through the woods and we’re selling a product. "This album’s about girl power! And I was like ugh, actually it’s not. “Which was also really funny because a lot of people on the business side of things, just completely missed the mark." That was a moment Halsey realised that the music was "an important thing to put out there there’s not a lot of places to go when you don’t’ have a femme-facing gender identity as a pregnant person." And there wasn’t a lot of that in popular culture." “Picking myself apart because I don’t look or act or feel the way the social expectation of a person who identifies the way that I do, should. “Which is funny because I grew up on Fallout Boy, Panic! At The Disco, and My Chemical Romance and all these bands that song titles are a paragraph long – so it’s cool knowing where that come from.” That’s a pretty unlikeable statement,” they continued. “I mean the album’s called If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power. It can really touch you when you’re a young person coming-of-age but I’ve been doing this long enough now that it’s like, I had to unlearn being likeable and my art would suffer if I didn’t.” “I think I’m also coming to an age where I’ve received plenty of criticism or Internet, whatever. “I haven’t felt that way about music since my debut album…” Now four albums into their career, Halsey isn’t just making music for fun or as a job, they’re making art for themselves. "They’d send it and I’d be like ‘I love it, let’s do more, let’s make it crazier, more chaotic, weirder.’ I think I won them over by being down with the weirder choices.” ‘Making this album was a lesson in un-learning being likeable’ I knew, and they told me this later, that they’re sitting in their studio ‘There’s no way she’s going to go for this, this is way too intense and chaotic’." “It was a cool experience on both sides, they would send me back stuff that was really industrial or intense. "They did a complete facelift of the entire record, turned it inside out upside down and backwards." But I knew there was this commonality in that we both love to make cinematic music and music that tells a story.” As much as I love the music, at a first mention – Halsey + Nine Inch Nails – I feel like before this album most people go ‘Ughhh, I don’t see it’.
“I’ve been plagiarising Nine Inch Nails for the past six years, so they weren’t too mad about it which was really cool,” they joked. That’s Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the Nine Inch Nails masterminds and Oscar-winning film composers that Halsey enlisted to produce If I Can’t Have Love I Want Power, which was a “huge dream” come true. And obviously, the best people who come to mind are Trent and Atticus.”
There are stakes, and it needs to be visceral and palpable. “So here I am: I’m super-pregnant and I’m writing this concept album… and I need to feel tense and anxious. As those things came to the surface it was like ‘okay cool, I get this, I understand it and now I need to explore it’.” “The answer that they didn’t want to hear is ‘yes, I am going to start saying no more because my priorities are evolving’. ‘Is she going to be able to play shows? Is she going to be able to work? Is she going to start saying ‘No’ more?’ “I was also daily battling expectations of me as an artist, because there was a lot of people who were very politely nervous about the fact that I was pregnant. And as we wrote when it was triple j’s Feature Album, those topics are rare in popular song. It’s a deeply personal work that’s menacing yet infectiously melodic, on which the 26-year-old grapples with the “joys and horrors of pregnancy and childbirth”. IICHLIWP isn’t calculated to saturate the Top 40 or spawn a meme-able moment. “You have to remove yourself from popular media and be like ‘Okay, what do I want to write?’ and not ‘Is this going to sound good on the radio right now?’” “I’ve always wanted to make that kind of a record that was unapologetic and just didn’t care about chart success or trends or whatever,” Halsey tells triple j Breakfast in a rare interview for the new album. And that's exactly where they want to be. Halsey talks about pregnancy, gender norms, snagging Nine Inch Nails, which song they want their child to hear and following your gut.Īfter releasing If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, the darkest and angriest album of their career, Halsey (who uses she/they pronouns) is truly in the ‘Zero F**ks Given’ mindset.