HALESTORM frontwoman Lzzy Hale talked to Los Angeles Daily News about the progress of the recording sessions for the band’s follow-up to 2018’s “Vicious” album. She said: “I don’t think I am the same person I was when I started writing the songs for this record. We wrote a lot [pre-pandemic] and threw a lot away; we recorded a lot and threw a lot away. New stuff just rose to the surface and the album began shaping itself into what it needed to be. It was truly life-saving to have that outlet and that direction during that time and we put everything we had into it so it’s going to be a barn burner because of that.”
In a separate interview with Portland Mercury, Lzzy spoke about being able to work on new music helped her deal with the pandemic and get through the year and a half of not being able to play live shows.
“We began writing this album before the pandemic hit and then I feel like I lived about three different lifetimes through that,” she explained. “And then we just recorded our last song for the album yesterday.
“In a lot of ways, writing kind of saved me. First and foremost, I love live music and touring and being in the bus and the whole thing. And since I was 13 when we started the band, we had never gone this long without a live show. Because even when I was 13, we had two bowling alley shows a month, which I totally would have taken during the pandemic. So in a lot of ways, writing music was just the outlet. It’s where I could put all of my fears and my doubts, trying to reconnect with the person I am offstage because I hadn’t seen her in a while. It’s just the power of music, man. You reconnect with why you really love music. And what I discovered is it’s not about the whole ‘I wanna be a rock star’ thing, it’s not about the live show, it’s not even about the fans and the radio and whatever it is. It’s my thing. It’s a part of me.”
In August, HALESTORM released a new single called “Back From The Dead”. The video for the track, directed by Dustin Haney (Noah Cyrus, Luke Combs) and produced by Revolution Pictures, features Lzzy and the rest of the band in a morgue and cemetery somewhere between life and death.
HALESTORM‘s new music is once again being produced by Nick Raskulinecz, who first helmed the band’s 2017 effort “ReAniMate 3.0: The CoVeRs eP” and was previously described by Hale as the group’s “fifth member.”
Two months ago, HALESTORM drummer Arejay Hale told Lou Brutus of HardDrive Radio about the band’s musical approach on the upcoming album. “At this point, we’re just, well, we could either try to create as much open, breathable space so when we play these songs in arenas, they can sound really big, or we can try to do almost the opposite, but tastefully. Like, let’s try to bring out more personality, let’s try to be even more ourselves in the sense of bringing more energy to the songs. ‘Cause like it or not, we play without a click track live, so the songs are gonna be a little bit faster, we’re gonna throw more notes in here and there, we’re gonna get excited and do something crazy.
“I feel like with every record we do, we have that much more experience and we get even closer and closer to matching our live energy, which has been consistently our M.O. when it comes to going in the studio,” he continued. “So that’s where we’re at once again. We’re, like, ‘Let’s try and amp it up even more.’ And not playing a show for a year and a half definitely brought out a lot more aggression, I think, in us.
“We said, ‘Working on this record throughout the entire pandemic, it’s either gonna be the best record we put our or it’s gonna be the most insane record we put out, and everyone’s either gonna love it or hate it,'” Arejay added. “I hope that they love it. I love it. It gets me excited. I feel like with these new songs, there’s an energy and excitement there that has been lacking in the last couple of records.”
Lzzy and her brother Arejay formed the band in 1998 while in middle school. Guitarist Joe Hottinger joined the group in 2003, followed by bassist Josh Smith in 2004.
In December 2018, HALESTORM was nominated for a “Best Rock Performance” Grammy Award for its song “Uncomfortable”. Six years earlier, the band won its first Grammy in the category of “Best Hard Rock/ Metal Performance” for “Love Bites (So Do I)”.
