Halsey has finally released their fourth studio album, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power.
The artist made an Instagram post announcing the project on July 7, and it was described as “a concept album about the joys and horrors of pregnancy and childbirth.”
“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,” Halsey said at the time.
“My body has belonged to the world in many different ways the past few years, and [the album cover] is my means of reclaiming my autonomy and establishing my pride and strength as a life force for my human being.”
And just week after their album announcement, the 26-year-old gave birth to their first child with partner Alev Ayedin. Halsey is now speaking out about their pregnancy experience while in the public eye — admitting in an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that some of the conversations triggered feelings of shame.
“I’m 26, and I tried very hard for this pregnancy,” Halsey said. “And it was like, I’m financially independent, I’m pretty far along in my career. It feels like the right time for me to do it.”
“I got treated like a teen mom a lot of the time, you know what I mean?” Halsey said. “Where people were like, ‘Oh my god, you’re so young, and you have so much to do in your career, and you’re not married…It triggered all of these feelings of shame from when I was younger,” she added.
“The flip side of it, right, is that I don’t and I wait until I’m in my 30s and I do SNL for the sixth time and have my seventh No. 1 album and whatever,” Halsey explained. “I’d do the same stuff over and over and over again.”
“But then, there’s also, ‘She worked too hard, she never had a family. She’s going to die alone. She was too obsessed with work, she never found someone. It’s a shame she’s not going to have any kids. Her career’s not going to hold her at night,'” they continued.
“OK. So f*** ’em,” they said. “I just was like, I’m going to do what I want to do. You know what I mean? I was like, This is important to me.“
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Halsey revealed that they had received heat for the album’s horror theme as well as their own feelings about her pregnancy because people expected her to be happier post-miscarriages.
They have also been open about their miscarriages in the past, describing the experiences in a 2020 interview with the Guardian as “the most inadequate [she has] ever felt.”
“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,” she told the outlet. “Then I have to go onstage and be this sex symbol of femininity and empowerment? It is demoralizing.”
Speaking on the speculation surrounding their pregnancy in an Instagram story in March, Halsey wrote: “Why is it ok to speculate and pass judgement about fertility and conception? My pregnancy was 100% planned, and I tried very hard for this bb. But I would be just as happy even if it were another way.”
Halsey also shared in the interview how they “knew the whole time” they were making the album and its accompanying film that people would be overly critical of the aforementioned themes.
“I knew…that people were going to be like, ‘For someone like Halsey, who’s had miscarriages and whatever, she shouldn’t have been working so hard. Would it have killed her to stay home and relax for the baby?'” they recalled.
“I think everyone who has heard me yearn for motherhood and yearn for this for so long would have expected me to write the album that was full of gratitude,” they continued. “And instead I was like, ‘No, this s*** is so scary and so horrifying. And my body’s changing and I have no control over anything. And I do finally have this thing I want. So I wake up and fear every single day that I’m going to lose it.'”
“Everyone’s like, ‘Aren’t you just living a dream?'” Halsey added. “I’m like, ‘No. Actually, I have nightmares about waking up in a pool of my own blood.'”
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