When Halsey’s first album, 2015’s Badlands, took off, “New Americana” was its designated hit. The track is a self-conscious attempt to define a generation “high on legal marijuana/Raised on Biggie and Nirvana,” a flimsy but easily digestible thesis statement for critics who saw the Tumblr-poet-turned-pop-star as a “millennial built in a lab,” as a New York Times profile put it then. But the album’s true promise came 10 tracks later, on “Gasoline”: “Do you tear yourself apart to entertain like me?” The pull toward self-immolation saturates Halsey’s music, and they’ve spent every album since drawing a big circle around it, in grand metaphors and gaudy costumed concepts. It’s in the way they call themself a hurricane, in the overdetermined tragedy of their Romeo and Juliet-themed album, in the formulaic pop songs they made later—even within the ache of their Auto-Tuned lines on the Chainsmokers hit that threatened to define their career. They turned the examination of their psyche into spectacle: splashy breakup songs with big-name features, an EP structured to take place in a single room.
On the surface, Halsey’s latest album, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, fits this tradition of grand gestures. The singer, who uses she/they pronouns, is releasing the record alongside an IMAX film of the same name; there have been no singles, only increasingly gory, fantastical trailers and a theatrical unveiling of the album art at the Met. But the record itself has a tight, internal focus: It’s about walking the line between self-preservation and self-destruction, control and compulsion, the thrill and terror of getting what you want. Instead of sieving these themes through an elaborate architecture, Halsey lets horror—of the body, of the mind, of mortality—radiate outward. The result is alluring and spectral. It’s their best work yet.
Largely that’s because they sound so good: clear and cool and lilting. Nine Inch Nails members and film score mainstays Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross produced the record, and the pair seem eager to announce their unlikely place in pop music. On the opening tracks, they create a psychedelic Gothic fairytale—wisps of wind, icy piano, panoramic synth blur, a churning undercurrent listed in the credits as a “menacing beat”—while Halsey sings about loneliness and crowns and Judas (“Jesus needed a three-day weekend/To sort out all his bullshit”), but mostly about a pervasive sense of doom. “Don’t wait for me,” they cry over the chaos, “it’s not a happy ending.” Reznor and Ross spend most of the album experimenting, careening through genres and hinting at a danger that’s never fully realized. They cram songs with texture, reverberating screams and screeching sirens; the busyness can feel like a distraction. The sound is sometimes abrasive, but rarely shocking. The rollicking “honey” oscillates between frenetic drums and guitar, with Dave Grohl behind the kit and a cyborg inflection that leaks in from hyperpop. “I’ve been corrupted,” Halsey sings on “Lilith,” and a spasm of glitch submerges the last note.
If there’s an organizing framework to the album, it’s dissonance. Halsey wrote the album as they fell in love and navigated pregnancy; the writing zigzags between stability and self-sabotage. Every bit of sweetness is anchored in devastation. “Only you have shown me how to love being alive,” they hum on “Darling.” On “Ya’aburnee,” the delicate closing song and the conclusion to all this examination, they can only express commitment in the direst terms: “You will bury me before I bury you.”
With no features, the atmosphere of the album becomes unsettlingly claustrophobic. The effect is intoxicating on “Whispers,” where Halsey actualizes and criticizes their innermost thoughts. The premise might be hokey or campy from a lesser writer, but Halsey is so good at parsing their competing impulses, so brutal in their self-assessment: “This is the glimmer of light that you’re keeping alive when you tell yourself, ‘I bet I could fuck him,’” they murmur. It’s a line that feels ripped from their first album, a further reiteration of what Halsey has been telling us since the beginning; though its sound is varied and its production heady, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power rarely offers a new dimension. But for a pop star who has tried to write sweeping anthems about being young in today’s America, this is the song, and the album, that seems most likely to resonate: scrolling through a screen at night and surveying the wreckage, looking for a way to slow your own sacrifice.
Buy: Rough Trade
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