For her fourth album, Halsey has teamed up with a pair of unexpected producers: Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The singer-songwriter, who is also pregnant with her first child, announced the upcoming project earlier today in a tweet featuring a video slowly panning out on a billboard advertising 2021’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power. The 10 second clip also features a snippet of a song, teasing what we can probably expect from the collaboration.
“All of this is temporary,” Halsey sings over steady, menacing guitar distortion. The official Nine Inch Nails Twitter account shared the same clip.
If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power
The FOURTH album by Halsey
Produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross pic.twitter.com/BbUx2htDkY
— h (@halsey) June 28, 2021
It should come as no surprise that Reznor and Ross lent a darker, more sinister vibe to Halsey’s new music. The pair are known for their moody, electronic-tinged soundtrack work for film and TV shows like The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl and Watchmen. In 2010, they won an Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Social Network, picking up another this year for Pixar’s Soul. They also scored a 2013 Grammy for their work on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and an Emmy for their work on HBO’s Watchmen.
The gloomier sound is a bit of a departure for Halsey, whose work has tended to skew a little more brightly atmospheric. But then, it makes sense that she’s feeling a little moody given the fact that the If I Can’t Have Love was written and recorded over the past year. After releasing her third album, Maniac, in January 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the singer to cut her world tour short. The postponed dates were ultimately canceled in January 2021. That and, you know, the whole global tragedy of the past 16 months is bound to have even the most chipper amongst us feeling a little more gloomy than usual. No word yet on the album’s release date.
