Even after a full day of press, and on the back of two profoundly strange years, Lzzy Hale and Joe Hottinger are easy company. Halestorm’s frontwoman and guitarist are welloiled but friendly interviewees, with a degree of self-awareness that can feel absent in a lot of their contemporaries. “I remember all the press before the [last] record came out,” Hottinger recalls sheepishly. “It was a new city every day and eight hours of interviews. We came home and [I had to] relearn how to not talk about myself…”
“It felt like there was nothing for a long time” Hale chuckles, “and then all of a sudden it’s: ‘Go, go, go, do all the things!’”
Something is different, though. It’s as if a wall had come down, very quietly. Hale still looks like someone who’s been eating rock’n’roll for breakfast since she could chew (all leather jacket, casual rakishness and dyed blonde crop), but there’s a looser edge to her appearance. Less gloss in her responses.
Following 2018’s incendiary Vicious album, in the year or so before covid entered our lives, Hale started going to therapy. When the world shut down, she found herself with a headful of demons and nowhere to put them, except in her songs. Back From The Dead, Halestorm’s fifth studio album, is the result. Hard-riffing, often tortured and always uncompromising, it’s the sound
