If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, Halsey collaborated with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails to create one of the year’s best pop albums (or at least, album by an often-pop-leaning artist). They’ve expressed their delight at working with the duo on numerous times, and in a new interview, they confessed that reaching out to them felt like writing a letter to Santa.
“First and foremost, I thought I was writing a letter to Santa saying, ‘I’ve been a very good girl.’ I was just really honest and said I was a huge fan and I’ve been plagiarizing you guys for years — badly — and I’m not arrogant enough to believe I have anything new to offer you, but this album is about pregnancy, gender identity, and body horror,” Halsey said in a new NME feature. The most essential thing to me is that this record has tension – it has to be visceral, or else I’m not doing the message justice.”
“I’ve gone to Berlin like 15 times and still won’t go to Berghain because I’m afraid they’ll turn me away at the door,” they said, comparing the experience of asking Reznor and Ross to trying to get into the highly exclusive Berlin nightclub Berghain. I’m afraid that if they say no to me, I’ll never be able to recover, so I don’t even want to go. That’s how it felt sitting outside Berghain, thinking, ‘Are they going to think I’m cool enough?’ ‘”
Meanwhile, Reznor recently said that he was intimidated by the prospect of working with Halsey, adding, “To come along and work with Halsey, I think we were intimidated at first.” ‘Is it a pop star, and if so, does that mean it’s associated with major enterprises and needs to feel a specific way? ‘We don’t want to screw it up, and we’re not here to troll.’ ‘At some point, someone is going to talk sense into Halsey and tell her that this may be career-sabotaging because it’s not going to be a TikTok track,’ we were thinking.
