Halsey has expressed frustration at not being given enough credit for their 2021 album, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, which was produced by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
The news that Reznor and Ross were working with Halsey - who uses she/they pronouns - came as a surprise, but the collaboration proved to be a fruitful one. If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power ended up being hailed as not only one of the best albums of Halsey’s career, but also one of the finest of the year.
A lot of the commentary, though, focused on Reznor and Ross’s contributions rather than Halsey’s and, although she’s never expressed any regret at working with the duo, she thinks that some of the noise around the success overplayed their role in its success.
“Is everyone OK?” she says in an interview with Rolling Stone UK. “You think that two rock dads wrote my female rage album about the horrors of being pregnant and accepting suburbia?”
If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power came billed as a concept album about "the joys and horrors of pregnancy and childbirth,” and took Halsey away from the pop sound that had typified some of their earlier work in favour of something darker and more brooding and industrial. One track, Honey, also featured Dave Grohl on drums.
Speaking to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe around the time of If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power’s release, Halsey indicated that she actually started writing its songs long before Reznor and Ross came onboard. However, in search of “really cinematic sort of, not horror specifically, but kind of just really unsettling production,” the Nine Inch Nails men were sought out.
Reluctant to approach them - “I’m not cool enough. They’ll never do it. I’m not interesting enough,” were the initial thoughts - Halsey did eventually get their songs in front of Reznor, and he was impressed by what he heard.
“Trent said something to me that I’ll never forget for the rest of my life, where he was like, ‘Hey, the record is great how it is,’” recalled Halsey. “He was like, ‘So you could not do this with us and put it out.’”
However, Reznor also outlined what he thought he and Ross could bring to the project.
“He’s like, ‘the way a lot of modern music is right now is it informs the listener not to pay attention. It says, this song is safe. You can put it on a playlist. You can listen to it in a car. You can play it on a party, and it’s not going to fuck up the vibe. It blends in with everything else. It’s a mood. It’s chill. But it informs you not to pay attention.’
“He was like, ‘Your songs, I think, deserve better than that, and I think that they should make people pay attention to what you’re saying.’ He said, ‘so I’m going to make some really weird choices.’ And I was like, ‘please make weird choices. Make the weirdest choices.’”
Having revealed earlier this year that she felt “lucky to be alive” after battling lupus and leukaemia, Halsey releases their new album, The Great Impersonator, on 25 October.
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