Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross revealed that they’re producing Halsey’s newly-announced album If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power. It will be her fourth full-length following 2020’s R&B/pop record Manic.
Both Nine Inch Nails and Halsey teased a snippet of music from the album featuring a noisy industrial instrumental under Halsey’s clear vocals, promising her least pop-centric album to date. The pop star sounds like she’s playing along with the dark textures rather than just letting the instrumental support her songwriting. The snippets were posted along with video clips of billboards revealing the album’s title and name dropping the producers.
It won’t be the first time that Halsey has worked with rock-related musicians. She released a nu-metal song called “Experiment on Me” from Birds of Prey: The Album last February, which she made in collaboration with Bring Me the Horizon. She also appeared on Machine Gun Kelly’s pop-punk track “Forget Me Too” and the 2019 Yungblud/Travis Barker single “11 Minutes.”
Halsey had told Vogue last November that she was thinking about releasing a full rock album following those recent collaborations. “I do really want to, but it needs to come naturally,” she said. “I’ve never sat down before and been like, ‘Okay, I want to make this type of album.’ The album kind of makes itself. When that time comes, it’ll happen on its own. I definitely need to do it eventually though, because I’m starting to age out of being angsty and punk.”
More details on the forthcoming album are sure to follow. All that has been revealed so far is what’s seen on the billboards in the pop star and producers’ teaser clips.
Reznor and Ross are still pretty hot off the success of their score for Pixar’s Soul, which they made in collaboration with Jon Batiste. It won them the Oscar and Golden Globe awards for ‘Best Original Film Score’ and the ASCAP Composer’s Choice Awards equivalent of that, ‘Film Score of the Year.’ The producers commented that they’d be working on new Nine Inch Nails material right after their Oscar win, but they’ve been keeping busy on other artists’ music as well, including collaboration with HEALTH called “Isn’t Everyone.” Nine Inch Nails has some co-headlining dates with Pixies planned for later this year, plus festival appearances at Riot Fest 2021, Louder Than Life 2021, Welcome to Rockville 2021 and Hellfest 2022.
Photo credit: Raymond Flotat
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