Singer Halsey announced the title and cover art of her new album this week in an Instagram post. Her upcoming album, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, is a concept album exploring her relationship with motherhood.
Halsey is using the album to explore the relationship between sexuality, femininity, and motherhood.
Halsey exploring pregnancy with her new album makes a lot of sense. This January, the singer took to Instagram to announce her pregnancy, captioning the photo “Surprise!” Fans were elated for Halsey because, in 2015, the star suffered a miscarriage.
In a conversation with The Guardian last year, she explained how she felt “inadequate” after the tragedy. She continued, “Here I am achieving this out-of-control life, and I can’t do the one thing I’m biologically put on this earth to do. Then I have to go onstage and be this sex symbol of femininity and empowerment? It is demoralizing.”
Now? Halsey is tackling motherhood head-on. In her July 7th post announcing the name and art, the singer’s caption explained the impetus behind such a personal album. She wrote, “This album is a concept album about the joys and horrors of pregnancy and childbirth. It was very important to me that the cover art conveyed the sentiment of my journey over the past few months.”
Halsey is celebrating the bodies that come with pregnancy while challenging society’s ideological conflicts around motherhood.
She continued by revealing the inspiration behind the cover art, “The dichotomy of the Madonna and the Whore. The idea that me as a sexual being and my body as a vessel and gift to my child are two concepts that can co-exist peacefully and powerfully.” As a trapping that all mothers and all women face again and again in the search for respect, Halsey has a lot of exciting room to explore the dichotomy in her album along with its art.
In her caption, she also explains why she decided to model for her album, saying, “this image is my means of reclaiming my autonomy and establishing my pride and strength as a life force for my human being. This cover image celebrates pregnant and postpartum bodies as something beautiful, to be admired. We have a long way to go with eradicating the social stigma around bodies & breastfeeding. I hope this can be a step in the right direction!”
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