LZZY HALE Says Making New HALESTORM Album Was 'Most Difficult, Maddening And Rewarding Process Yet'

HALESTORM has finished mastering its new album for an early 2022 release. The follow-up to 2018's "Vicious" was once again produced by Nick Raskulinecz who first helmed HALESTORM's 2017 effort "ReAniMate 3.0: The CoVeRs eP" and was previously described by singer Lzzy Hale as the group's "fifth member."

On Saturday (December 18),Lzzy shared a photo of her listening to the new HALESTORM album after it was mixed and mastered in its entirety the previous night. She added in an accompanying caption: "I'm so grateful to my entire team for their incredible hard work, passion and patience. I'm also grateful for my bandmates that stepped up to make this album magic. I can't wait to unleash this beast into the world. Holy fuck."

A day earlier, Lzzy posted a few pictures of her and guitarist Joe Hottinger "right after" they "got dropped off at home after living in a tour bus for weeks." She wrote: "We are listening to final mixes of our new album today. We dove right into listening and creating song sequences to best tell our story. I'm so proud of this album. It was the most difficult, maddening, and rewarding process yet. Y'all ain't ready for this beast."

Earlier this month, Lzzy told Brandy Richey of Pittsburgh's 105.9 The X radio station about HALESTORM's upcoming LP: "During the time that we were writing it, I got a lot of inspiration by just the stories and just people living their lives and survival stories and literally just conversations that I've had with these people. So, in turn, I feel like even just as an artist, it was a really neat way for me to find myself again and see myself in them, but also in turn I feel like everyone's going to see some of themselves on this album. So, yeah, it's a beautiful thing."

Last month, Lzzy told the 105.7 The Point radio station about the musical direction of the new HALESTORM material: "This album is absolutely a banger. It's on eleven. We have really just kind of exceeded all of the energy that has come before on these albums, both technically, music-wise, vocally, drum, lyric-wise. I think because of the roller-coaster ride when we were making this record, and just through the pandemic and all the different phases of that, we just kind of looked at each other, like, if the future is unknown and we don't know whether we're actually going to be out and playing these things, everything has to be, like I said, at eleven. It's HALESTORM elevated.

"It was kind of funny. My bass player, Josh [Smith], he was showing some new songs to his parents. And his dad is, like, 'Wow. You really just grabbed on to your sound.' And I'm, like, 'We have a sound?' [Laughs] I didn't really think about it that way before. But, yeah, it's very us."

According to Lzzy, she and her bandmates recorded the new HALESTORM album in a different way. "This is the first time that we've ever had dual producers," she explained. "We went back with Nick Raskulinecz [who helmed 'Vicious']. And then I ended up doing my vocals with Scott Stevens from THE EXIES. He's like a brother from another mother with me. We've written together before, and we've known each other for probably just shy of a decade now. He and I, we produced and did all the vocals for [HALESTORM's recently released single] 'Back From The Dead' with each other, because I went out to L.A. And then we ended up sending it to Nick, and Nick's, like, 'This is just absolutely amazing. We have to do every song this way.' So we kind of did it differently. We ended up with the bare bones of a demo. I ended up finishing all of my vocals — like dunzo — before we ended up building the track musically. So it's kind of like building a pyramid upside down. But it ended up really just having this different energy, because what we were able to do with the lyrics and melody and all the vocals being done would really accentuate all of that — matching the theme to whatever I was singing about, but also just kind of really supporting the vocals musically when we went in to do the guitars and drums and bass. It's so crazy — it definitely has this very forward, very aggressive nature to it because of the way that we did that."

"Back From The Dead" was released in August. The official music 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.

Lzzy and her brother Arejay formed the band in 1998 while in middle school. Hottinger joined the group in 2003, followed by 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)".