Halestorm: Fighting Destruction With Creation

With their first UK tour since COVID-19 under their belts and their fifth studio album simmering away in the oven, Pennsylvanian quartet HALESTORM have had an arsenal of past experiences and current emotions to draw from when putting pen to paper for their upcoming release, Back From The Dead. Whilst a lot of bands have revelled in the spare time the lockdowns have offered, sometimes churning out more than one album’s worth of material, these hard rockers have instead struggled with finding even a morsel of their love for music in the midst of the chaos.

Musing over the momentary loss of direction, guitarist Joe Hottinger delved into how himself and frontwoman Lzzy Hale initially tackled being isolated from their counterparts Arejay Hale and Josh Smith. “I don’t think we should see each other anymore. What are we doing? What are we doing this for? I know eventually we’ll make a record, but are we gonna be allowed to tour it? Do we even like music anymore?”

After having not performed live for six or seven months, the withdrawals from the natural high and life’s sweet drug took its toll, making every attempted lyric and riff feel void of life and purpose. The feeling seemed to be unanimous across the board from artist to fan, the temporary Zoom shows and Facebook livestreams never being able to live up to the euphoria that the rock show offers. The key, according to Joe, was just to keep going. Fail after fail after fail, the win is bound to rear it’s fruitful and beautiful head at some point. “You wake up and you do it, even when you don’t want to. All of a sudden, the thing that you do just kind of happens naturally and your instinct takes over and you start following something.”

Surprisingly though, the anger, frustration, and vexation felt amongst the general population wasn’t the reason for the newfound viciousness and heaviness that appears on the record, instead opting for their trademark optimism in their lyrics and counteracting that with their most down-tuned guitars to date. “We’ve never done so many songs in drop C before, but with middle-of-the-road catchy rock songs like The Steeple and Back From The Dead, done in a drop C guitar, it sounds heavier and much more aggressive, all from just shifting the key.” It’s not just Joe’s wailing guitars and Lzzy’s signature banshee vocals that have been given a shot of steroids though, as Arejay’s drumming also exercises the same energy as The Muppet’s Animal – if you can imagine Animal on cocaine.

Those who have seen HALESTORM on their latest UK run will be familiar with the brand spanking new sound of the dystopian Bombshell. Born from a mistake in the studio from a broken Les Paul tuner, a strum on the low E string resonated a deep, thick ‘boing’ sound, like a heavy loaded spring. “I love the bridge and solo section where Lzzy sings, ‘I’m not fragile like a flower. I’m fragile like a bomb.’ Like, fuck yeah girl. Fuck yeah!” The childlike wonderment and excitement emitting from Joe extends to all of the tracks on the new album, but specifically Strange Girl and the piano ballad Raise Your Horns, which ends the LP on a sombre and subdued tone, much like Vicious and The Silence.

“We initially tried to stick it in the middle, but it just didn’t work,” he explains. “It’s an emotionally heavy song, and the first time I heard it I cried. Lzzy wrote the shit out of that one. What are you going to follow that with? You have to have the chance to really feel it, because it’s sticky and it stays with you. It’s heavy with feeling instead of heavy with sonics, contrary to what you might think when you hear the songs’ title, but when it ends, you just sit there and take it in for a second.”

Community, individualism, and acceptance mixed with a healthy dose of attitude and anarchy are the commandments that are preached daily in the church of HALESTORM. Latest single The Steeple pays homage to the popular nursery rhyme, but is also a metaphor for the sense of togetherness that the rock show is capable of evoking. “In our church, Lzzy would be the Pope, she’s the boss mama and she’s in charge. I’ll go with being the Bishop, the Pope’s right-hand guy. And then we’ll make Josh the Priest and Arejay the alter boy because he’s our pet drummer. I don’t know if they’d agree if you asked them though!”

Much like Lzzy’s iconic leather, mesh, and nine-inch heel getups, after being in this touring game for close to half his life you’d think Joe would also have his wardrobe strategy figured out and nailed down to a tee. “I still haven’t figured out what the hell I’m doing with my stage clothes. Josh and I were talking a while back like, ‘what are you gonna do for this album cycle? What are you gonna wear?’ I don’t know, man. I don’t know what I’m doing. I still don’t know what I’m doing.” The former half of HALESTORM’s An Evening With… set featured acoustic renditions and genre-mashing jam sessions from their catalogue. “What’s the opposite of putting on a leather jacket and black jeans?” Joe muses. “Big balloon pants and a flannel shirt; it’ll be like we’re in our pyjamas! Yeah, let’s go for that. I usually like to play in a couple of layers so that when I’m fully sweated through I can just be like, ‘ew, gross, take it off’.”

Now that they’re back out on the road though, getting reacquainted with stressful airport lounges and long haul flights, it feels almost as if the world were finally put to rights again. As much as the British weather takes credit for being the most talked about feature of the UK, Joe and the gang still took the opportunity to sight-see as best they could in their COVID-19 bubble. “We enjoy hiking and walking through the urban jungle, getting on and off a bus just to walk for a few miles. The first two or three days we were in London doing rehearsals, and we wouldn’t start rehearsing till later in the afternoon. So we’d wake up and just go out and walk 10/15 miles around London. I like taking pictures everywhere I go too, I always have my camera on me.”

One such landmark HALESTORM stumbled upon was the COVID-19 Memorial Wall, a harrowing visual representation of the magnitude of lives lost. In the current dark and twisted times, it can be increasingly difficult to see whatever positives may be left. If there’s any advice Joe and HALESTORM can share about pulling themselves and others out of that hole, it’s fighting back with creation. “It’s the literal opposite of destruction and that’s all you can do. My weapons of choice are a guitar and a camera; create something that makes somebody feel something, or create something that makes you feel something.” All these trials and tribulations learned can be found amidst the brand new album, Back From The Dead, out May 6th.

Back From The Dead is out now via Atlantic Records.

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