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A confession: I had made peace not long ago with the prospect of Halsey and I never properly clicking. The pop star’s 2015 debut, Badlands, released when they were just out of high school, skewed grating and underdeveloped. It had a bad case of indie-girl voice I couldn’t get past. Subsequent releases thankfully showed blessed improvement (sharper lyrics, more interesting production, bigger risks), yet still largely left me cold. Halsey, who uses she/they pronouns, seemed on track to remain the kind of artist I could appreciate as talented and thoughtful, with an arsenal of songs I liked but didn’t love, without being able to pinpoint why they seemed stuck in a personal not-for-me file.

But when the 27-year-old pop star released If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power last year, I finally heard the proverbial click. Halsey made it relatively quickly — in about a year, with work beginning in earnest about six months after their last album, 2020’s hit-glutted Manic — with producing assistance later in the process coming from their personal heroes Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor (aka Nine Inch Nails). Halsey was pregnant for most the album’s making; ultimately, If I Can’t Have Love became the rare so-called motherhood album that subversively confronted the literal and ambient horrors inextricable from pregnancy and childbirth more than the joys that tend to be focused on in mainstream art homing in on the subject.

Read the full review on South Sound.