Lzzy Hale’s got a war cry for a voice and a therapist’s honesty in her lyrics. The Halestorm frontwoman doesn’t so much write songs as rip them out of her chest — and the band’s 2022 album Back from the Dead was, unsurprisingly, covered in blood.
"I’d never been home that long in my adult life," she says of the pandemic shutdown, a moment that cracked something open. For an artist bred on the grind — album, tour, repeat — being still felt like punishment. “I remember walking around my house thinking, ‘Who even am I when I’m not performing?’”
The answer, it turns out, was a woman with a lot to unpack. Mental health spirals, identity loss, existential dread — Back from the Dead became a journal she wrote in all-caps. “It started with just survival,” she says. “It was like, ‘I’m not okay, but I’m gonna find a way to be.’ That’s where ‘Strange Girl’ came from, that’s where the title track came from. Even ‘The Steeple’ was me trying to find meaning in chaos.”
But don’t mistake catharsis for collapse. Hale’s voice on these tracks isn’t weepy or wispy — it’s a battering ram. And when she sings about crawling out of graves, you believe her. “We weren’t even sure we were making an album at first,” she admits. “It was just, ‘What can we do to stay sane?’ I was calling Joe [Hottinger] like, ‘Please tell me you’ve got a riff. I need a reason to feel alive today.’”
They found enough reasons to make a record that sounds like resurrection. Loud, snarling, unapologetically pissed. “There’s no autopilot on this one,” she says. “Everything meant something.”
By the time they got back onstage — first in clubs, then festivals — the emotional weight turned into kinetic blast. “The first time we played ‘Back from the Dead’ live, I just lost it. I was crying while screaming. It was messy in the best way. You could feel it in the room — the crowd was grieving and healing right along with us.”
Hale’s always had a foot in the classic hard rock world, but she’s made room for something messier and more humane in her songwriting over the last decade. And lately, she’s been stepping into new lanes, both musically and metaphorically. In the spring, she dropped a haunting piano cover of Adele’s “Hello” — moody, dramatic, almost Tim Burton-esque. “I love the idea of taking a song everyone knows and twisting it into something darker,” she says. “Covers are my playground.”
They’re also a safe zone between album cycles, a way to stay loose and experiment without overthinking. “We’re working on a few more right now,” she teases. “Some are gonna surprise people.”
As for the next full-length, she’s playing coy. “We’re writing. We’re always writing,” she shrugs. “The trick is making sure we don’t just rewrite the last record. You have to push yourself into new places, even if it’s uncomfortable.”
And Hale seems perpetually comfortable being uncomfortable. She’s spoken candidly about anxiety, therapy, medication — things still treated like dirty laundry in parts of the rock world. “Look, I grew up in a time when vulnerability wasn’t rewarded. Especially not for women in rock. You had to be louder, tougher, meaner than the guys. But there’s strength in honesty. I’ve had fans come up and say, ‘I started therapy because of you.’ That means more than any chart position.”
Still, she’s quick to point out she’s not fixed. “I’m not here as the guru who figured it all out. I’m still in the trenches. I still have days where I feel like a fraud, or I want to quit, or I think, ‘What the hell am I doing with my life?’ But I’m not alone in that. And neither are you.”
The band’s recent appearance at Louder Than Life didn’t just underline their live firepower — it reasserted Halestorm as a group that thrives on raw nerve. “We’ve never been the cleanest or the most polished. But we mean it. And people can feel that.”
She pauses, then grins. “Besides, what’s rock and roll if it doesn’t scare you a little?”
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
