Halsey

Nonsense, we need you to write the liner notes, THEN it's the right move.

i have not heard anything she's done since "New Americana", is she still terrible

i guess she decided poppy needed competition?

Sounds like something that would be playing in the strip club in an episode of Banshee (a show I am currently binging).

"without me" was a v good single imo tho it's not surprising that it was almost never remarked on here -- kind of calibrated to be about as middle-of-the-road as possible while still employing the edgy production trend of its day. nonetheless effective! (to me)

this sounds like it might be shit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i45PAqrGDLc

optimistic about this, both this & the other clip sound very NIN & they've been in a great place as of late

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5TVJxBlymo

another teaser

https://www.stereogum.com/2158189/halsey-new-album-credits/news/

a few other interesting names in the credits too - buckingham, the bug especially

Can I just say that "If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power" is an awesome album title?

a few tracks in & this is great, impeccable production of course

"you asked for this" rules but i wish they'd mixed the vocals lower to fully commit to shoegaze

yeah wtf why is this so good

lmao at going straight from a shoegaze blowout to a Blackbird ripoff

but seriously, Darling is such a staggering misstep, there is no need for one of these on the album or on any album

"darling" is good at the thing it does and i was kinda amused they actually got buckingham to play on it too, "never going back again" etc. was what it reminded me of more immediately than "blackbird"

but also as good as this album is, it just really makes me want another NIN full-length already

they should hire Halsey to write songs for them

I thought this was cool of her

It’s Not Complicated, by Michael Brooks https://t.co/mhVv7QVkNm

— h (@halsey) May 13, 2021

There were some good moments among the first part of the LP but I got bored with it as it played on. Which happens to me with pop music a lot, I'm afraid - might explain why I don't listen to a lot of it.

It definitely falls off

yeah i would downgrade it to 'good' overall rather than 'great' but overall it's a success. i want a whole pop-shoegaze album from her now

idk if it's better than Manic, but it's refreshing to hear their songs produced in other than middle-of-the-road-radio-pop mode.

but on the other hand it's kind of middle-of-the-road alt. rock which might explain why people find it a bit boring?

It's Trent Reznor, which is why people are really enjoying the first half (+ selected others). NIN is not middle-of-the-road alt rock ffs

yeah even when it is doing fairly straight-forward rock songs the guitar textures rule etc. it's not really middle-of-the-road, maybe "honey" is the closest to that though? and it's still fine

the slower tracks are the weaker ones because nin's bag of tricks there gets a bit repetitive while the up-tempo tracks are more varied in their approach

Yeah, Girl Is A Gun is kinda outrageous

Yeah I don't disagree with you, there's plenty of inspired things on this album, and by middle of the road I mainly meant those slower tracks that drag a bit.

i think ultimately i'd much rather hear nin produce a pop singer who has a much stronger melodic sense, like it's still very clear to me why i wasn't a fan of halsey's previous stuff on this album, it's mostly carried by the production

It's much more a Halsey record than the Nine Inch Nails feat. Halsey I assume some people hoped for. Obv they bring their sound to it, but I wouldn't think that Halsey's old fans would be disappointed by this. I'm not familiar with Reznor/Ross' other production work so I don't know if they were more involved songwriting-wise in those.

reznor's previous outside production work isn't that extensive. the most notable projects are just the the early marilyn manson albums where he seemed to have played a fairly typical rock producer role (technical skills, a general advisory role, help with arrangements & programming etc.) and then the saul williams album where he was responsible for the entire backing.

on this one, my impression from interviews is halsey had already written most of the album & might have already recorded a near-complete version with other producers, but then gave it to reznor & ross to completely re-record & re-arrange, so it was much more nin arranging around halsey's vocal parts rather than halsey writing to nin's instrumentals.

thanks. I didn't know any of this. Them re-working a near-complete album makes sense.

halsey writing colors about matty healy is so funny. when she sings “your mother only smiles on her tv show” she’s talking about loose women

— baby annette (@evemmore) August 27, 2021

Multiple googles to understand that tweet

I occasionally listen to the alternative nation station on Sirius, if only to try to get a handle on what appellation has meant for the past 10 years, what aesthetic unites the Imagine dragons/foster the people/young the giant cohort, why young people would listen to music as such instead of Lil baby — and I am reminded of an interview with the program director of both LA K-rock and of NYC k-rock, where in trying to say what alternative music means now, he stated that "rock" shouldn't be appended to alt and that Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey do not fit in with it, the demo he's going for doesn't fuck with them, they're pop, etc etc…

And so I'm listening to the sirius station yesterday, and "you asked for this" did a fucking roundhouse kick out of the car's speakers relative to the dull shit I had heard for the previous hour… I'm kinda surprised that commercial radio pros like the guy I mention above would go with this song so quickly. like they would be "our audience doesn't care if halsey is trying to be like My Bloody Valentine, she's the same as Demi Lovato, we're not playing her"…

where in trying to say what alternative music means now, he stated that "rock" shouldn't be appended to alt and that Billie Eilish and Lana Del Rey do not fit in with it, the demo he's going for doesn't fuck with them, they're pop, etc etc…

what does 'alternative music' actually mean according to this guy then if not rock & not the billie/lana alt- end of pop because i feel like either of those should mean excluding imagine dragons-type shit too

interview with the guy was in NYT, don't have the time to find link, but the guy was pretty incoherent, trying to square circles according to corporate prerogatives…

i love this album it is awesome

If you have an hour

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If25K-dtvgg

I’m sure someone else has said this, but it’s as if Reznor and Ross heard Jack Antonoff’s produced records and decided to compete. Really love this on headphones on the first listen (and only knowing Halsey from the Chainsmokers song, didn’t expect to).

Pretty sure this is the article VM mentioned above (I remember us discussing it on another thread)

On-U remix !
trent drags his old production guru back into the mainstream for the first time in a very long time.
have only been able to check it out via spotify and my crappy laptop speakers as no option yet to buy this other than via itunes.
it is of course rather brilliant.
hopefully i will be able to buy it digitally via non-itunes options at some point.

Finally gave this a listen, it's good! I have no idea where Halsey fits into the music world. Is she a pop star? Did this come and go with nary a ripple?

The singles didn’t do so well. But her older songs are still on the radio all the time.

I was intrigued by the prospect of it - NIN-produced pop - but aspects of the record came off as Downward Spiral cosplay, without pushing hard enough in any one direction, pop or abrasive textures

Turns out that Manic is a better record

Nevertheless, it's fun that Kevin Martin and Jack Dangers had elements on a Halsey record

i think this is her best record. i struggled to make it through her previous ones

i love this album it is awesome

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Wednesday, September 1, 2021 9:45 AM (four months ago) bookmarkflaglink

I heard Honey played on pop radio at one point. I liked the fact that it didn't sound like anything else around it, more like something that would have been on KROQ in the 90s, something almost Cure-like about it, but I imagine that weighed against it getting playlisted like, say, Graveyard, which was played on infinite loop.