If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power

It’s just about everything you’d hope that a collab between Halsey and Reznor/Ross would be… except long enough.

On Halsey’s 13-track oeuvre, they present a masterclass in songwriting and production overflowing with a seductive industrial canvas as well as noise-rock, punk choruses, and fuzzed-out guitars.

If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is on an upward trajectory in terms of Halsey releasing quality music. By and by, Halsey may not have love, but her latest record is power.

A world of distortion and contradiction, blood and venom, ‘If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power’ is a singular statement, one of extreme power.

With art this bold and ambitious, Halsey doesn’t really have to choose between love and power: they deserve both.

Halsey’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is an album best served whole. Sure, it’s packing some infectious, radio-ready choruses, but there is so much more to unpack, with each listen peeling back layers of heartache but also dexterity and adventure, and much-needed sense of danger that their peers are lacking.

It almost goes without saying that this album is intense as hell and not exactly teeming with light relief. It’s also an intricate and an endlessly compelling artistic statement that only Halsey could have made.

More sonic and lyrical experimentation could allow the songs to make a deeper mark. But this record is a definite power-up from an artist who carries, as promised, “a knife with the heart on my sleeve”.

On If I Can’t Have Love, there’s romance, there’s sadness, there’s plenty of trademark defiance, but some of the album’s best moments are the most intimate.

Compared to this summer's pop offerings—think of the similarly themed efforts by Billie Eilish and Lorde, both of which deal with the trappings of fame with serenity and blissful detachment, respectively—If I Can't Get Love, I Want Power is provocative, and even ugly, in its most vulnerable moments. Self-indulgent, sure, but its emotional chaos feels earned.

An inaptly sleek production MO creates a barrier between the singer and listener on several otherwise cogent tracks. Still, despite this significant flaw, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power contains enough magic to be infectious, an ambitious work by an immensely gifted artist who is continuing to explore aesthetic possibilities.

If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power is ultimately rather straightforward, reprising many of the themes—self-doubt, self-sabotage, self-empowerment—that have been central to Halsey’s past work.

Even when Halsey returns to first-person through most of the album, their lyrics are less confessional, more general, as if they have stepped back from immediate conflicts.

The result is alluring and spectral. It’s their best work yet. ... 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.

Back to back, the songs are somewhat of a heavy-handed introduction to an album that’s at its most interesting not when it’s signaling its depth or using foreboding production as a surrogate for intensity. Instead, the music works best when Halsey follows their natural pop tendencies down new experimental paths.