“If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power” is the fourth studio album by American singer Halsey. The album was produced by Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor.
So let’s find some trivia and facts about this new body of work.
- If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is the fourth studio album by American singer-songwriter Halsey
- It was released on August 27, 2021, by Capitol Records
- It was written by Halsey, Johnathan Cunningham, Greg Kurstin
- It was produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
- Halsey described the project as “a concept album about the joys and horrors of pregnancy and childbirth”
- The cover artwork of If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power was inspired by artistic depictions of Mary, mother of Jesus
- A theatrical film directed by American filmmaker Colin Tilley
- Titled after the album and featuring its music
- The film was screened in select IMAX cinemas around the world on August 25 and 26, 2021, leading up to the album release
- If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is an alternative rock, grunge-pop, and pop punk effort with heavy industrial influence
- The sound of the album is driven by clattering drums, fuzzy guitars and cinematic textures
- Its lyrics center on femininist themes, such as addressing patriarchy and institutional misogyny
- The album has received critical acclaim
- Many critics emphased on its ambitious concept and theatrical production
- American singer-songwriter Halsey released herthird studio album, Manic, on January 17, 2020
- It included the successful single, “Without Me” (2018)
- This was the second Billboard Hot 100 number-one song of Halsey’s career
- She contributed to the Birds of Prey soundtrack, titled “Experiment on Me”, which is a nu-metal track produced by Oliver Sykes and Jordan Fish from the British rock band Bring Me the Horizon
- She released collaborative songs with other artists in 2020, such as Kelsea Ballerini’s “The Other Girl”, Juice Wrld’s “Life’s a Mess”, and Machine Gun Kelly’s “Forget Me Too”
- Halsey was slated to embark on her third concert tour, titled Manic World Tour, in 2020
- She had to postpone and reschedule many dates due to the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic
- The tour was announced cancelled on January 23, 2021
- She also announced her first pregnancy, with American screenwriter Alev Aydin, after suffering many miscarriages due to endometriosis and undergoing a surgery in 2017
- On June 28, 2021, numerous billboards went up across major cities of the United States, announcing the fourth studio album by Halsey, titled If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power
- The singer confirmed it herself through her social media accounts on the same day
- Together with the announcement, she also previewed one of the tracks from the album
- It was also revealed that the album was produced by American musician Trent Reznor and English musician Atticus Ross, members of American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails
- In a short teaser video, Halsey hinted at the album’s punk rock sound
- On July 7, 2021, Halsey unveiled the cover art
- Then, she also announced that If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power would be released on August 27, 2021
- Halsey gave birth to her child, Ender Ridley Aydin, on July 14, 2021
- Halsey stated If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is a concept album focusing on the positives and negatives of pregnancy and childbirth
- The album was originally built around “mortality and everlasting love and our place/permanence”
- But the emotional impact of her pregnancy “introduced new themes of control and body horror and autonomy and conceit”
- Halsey also emphasized that it “feels very cool” to have an album with no guest features again, following her debut studio album, Badlands (2015)
- She said If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power “had to be entirely from [her] voice”
- The album was a long-distance project, with Reznor and Ross recording in Los Angeles while Halsey sang all of its songs at a studio in Turks and Caicos Islands
- Other remote contributions include drums by American musician Dave Grohl in “Honey” and guitar strumming by American musician Lindsey Buckingham in “Darling”
- The album is an alternative rock, grunge-pop, and pop punk record
- With heavy industrial rock influences, incorporating hyperpop, synth-pop, ambient, noise rock, punk rock, pop-punk, drum n’ bass, hip hop and avant-garde styles
- It departs from the arena-pop sound of Halsey’s previous albums
- The instrumentation of If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power consists of rattling drums, and rough guitar riffs, heavily distorted
- Feminism is the overarching theme of the album’s subject matter, specifically institutionalized misogyny and patriarchy
- The cover artwork of If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power was unveiled through video shot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, in which Halsey walked through the exhibits before finally pulling away a cover to reveal the life-size picture of the artwork
- The cover artwork was photographed by Lucas Garrido
- It depicts an artistic rendering of Halsey as Madonna, a category of icons and works of art depicting Mary, mother of Jesus
- The singer is seen seated on a golden throne, wearing a purple dress, holding a baby with a towel, with her left breast exposed
- She stated that the artwork portrays “the sentiment of [her] journey over the past few months”
- It aims to uproot the social stigma around “bodies & breastfeeding”
- The artwork was specifically inspired by the Virgin and Child Surrounded By Angels from Jean Fouquet’s two-panel Renaissance oil painting called Melun Diptych
- It became a subject of widespread attention and discussion on the internet
- The Mercury News associated the artwork with the topfreedom movement on Instagram “#FreeTheNipple”, and noted visual similarities to Cersei Lannister, a Game of Thrones character
- A censored version of the album cover, where the exposed left nipple is covered by the baby’s hand, is also available to music streaming platforms
- If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power received critical acclaim upon release
- At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from publications, the album has a weighted mean score of 81 based on 13 critic reviews, indicating “universal acclaim”
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