Halsey
If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power
Capitol
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Halsey has always straddled the line between chart-topper and inventive indie artist as a prickly princess of pop. Success as a featured artist on several pop hits and a handful of their own painted them into a corner of sorts where the music they were best known for was not always the artist they wanted to be.
With their new release, Halsey reaches for greater agency casting off the shackles of expectations and success and crafts an image in her true likeness. With significant life changes swirling around her—most influential being a longed-for pregnancy—Halsey took the transitional moment to shed their skin and reveal themselves as the artist they were always destined to be.
Halsey embraces a sound that best reflects this turmoil and triumph by boldly partnering with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (of Nine Inch Nails and a slew of film scores fame). The initial tracks of the album confront a lot of the inner demons that swirl inside. There's acceptance in "The Tradition," a heavy piano-led track that tears apart the trappings of fame but broadens the observations to society addressing the value and gaze placed on young women. As Halsey growls, "Take what you want / Take what you can / … / Ask for forgiveness / Never permission," they are equally signing to the male mindset as well as empowering a new sense of agency in themselves.
With "Bells In Santa Fe," Halsey reckons with a callous heart and a disposable existence against a slow boil of cascading synth blips and disintegrating beats. It is the perfect blending of Halsey's honest rawness and the signature brooding of Reznor & Ross. Playing with expectations of such a pairing, the final coda is signature Nine Inch Nails that is abruptly cut down as if to shatter any thoughts of formulas at play.
The reckoning continues through the blistering post-punk "Easier Than Lying" and the hip-hop inspired "Lilith" that has them squaring up with destructive tendencies and the freedom that comes from giving them up.
Drum’n’bass inspired "Girl Is A Gun" is a joyous deadly romp through sexual surety and "You Asked For This," with its shoegaze influence, is a reflection on what happens when all you asked for is delivered and the void that follows.
The sweetness and lament in "Darling" is the album’s turning point, as Halsey sings, "Only you have shown me how to love being alive," embracing the new life growing inside. It's a song filled with a sense of promise against a glistening acoustic guitar and gorgeously stacked harmonies.
From here, the album bounds with a new focus on rebuilding oneself and preparing for a change in the way the world will view them. Confronting and dismantling the Madonna/Whore construct, Halsey is stripping away the facade and reveling in what remains.
On first listen, "Honey" is a raucous love song, but with repeated listening, you can't help but wonder if the "she" in the narrative of the song is the memory of her former self, the perfectly constructed image of the star on the stage. Similarly, "Whispers" is a tightly wound song of conscience that is on the verge of breaking. With its haunting yet reassuring refrain, "You do not want this," Halsey is freeing themselves from past mistakes.
A growing sense of authenticity and agency is evident in the standout "I Am Not A Woman, I'm A God" that finds Halsey looking at the duality of image, persona, and the imposter behind the mask.
With the narrative of the album challenging societal expectations and clawing away at fairytales women are fed, Halsey explores the sense of identity and (by her own admission) the "horrors of pregnancy" and all the fears and anxiety it brings, not only for yourself, but also for your child, the kind of person you will now be, as well the future that awaits you both.
This is all perfectly expressed in the album closer, "Ya'aburnee" which is filled with insecurity and hope, and an overwhelming sense of love—the real kind—against a taught melody and the beautiful observation, "I think we could live forever in each other's faces."
If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power may not be an album filled with the slew of radio-friendly bops many Halsey fans might wish for. And that's more a reflection on the shortcomings of the current pop landscape than on the album's contents. For here, Halsey has created the strongest and most focused album in her catalog and is more themselves than ever before. It's a beautiful, twisted, transformative journey in all senses of the word. And one worth all the praise it is sure to garner.
Notable Tracks: “Bells In Santa Fe” | “I Am Not A Woman, I’m A God” | “Whispers” | “You Asked For This”
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