Nearly three decades into fronting Halestorm, Lzzy Hale still sounds like she’s got something to prove — not to the industry, not to the charts, but to herself. On the band’s new album Everest, recorded with producer Dave Cobb, she rediscovered how to trust her gut. “It was just, does it get us excited? That was the rule,” she says.
Cobb had them writing and recording in real time in Savannah, Georgia — no demos, no safety nets, no time to overthink. “It was this desert island mentality,” Hale says. “No backup plan. If it doesn’t feel good right now, it’s not going to work later.” That process birthed a record that feels urgent, unfiltered, and, at times, volcanic.
The proof comes early with “Watch Out,” a raw, explosive anthem that didn’t even have a chorus until 4 a.m. “It was just this little outro I recorded half asleep,” Hale laughs. “I played it for Dave the next day and he’s like, ‘Nope, that’s the chorus. Scrap everything else.’” What started as a late-night throwaway became one of the record’s fiercest moments — a pep talk delivered through a scream. “I’m a pleasant person most of the time,” she says, “but you’ve got to put the anger somewhere.”
If Hale sounds self-assured, it’s because she’s earned it. Halestorm have been together 28 years — the same four members for 22 of them. “We’re a bunch of dorks from Pennsylvania who shouldn’t have made it this far,” she says. “We didn’t have a rich uncle in the business. It was just us, playing county fairs.” But now, fans who’ve been there since those days are turning up in vintage shirts, still grinning from the barricade. “That blows my mind,” she says. “That guy’s been showing up for a decade, and he’s still having the time of his life. You can’t take that for granted.”
Live, she sees everything — and everyone. “People think we can’t see them,” Hale says, laughing. “Oh, I see you. I’ve seen people argue, make out, fight, even… let’s just say… make more than out. Rock shows are wild. It’s the best people-watching in the world.”
For her, though, the real connection comes from revisiting songs written when she was still figuring herself out. “You can’t be who you were at 22,” she says. “But when you release a song, it’s not yours anymore — it’s theirs. So I don’t cringe. I feel grateful. Even if I thought I was edgy writing ‘I Get Off,’ I just smile about it now. It caught someone at a moment in their life, and that means something.”
That blend of gratitude and forward momentum fuels Everest. It’s heavy where it needs to be, melodic where it wants to be, and never confined by genre. “Once we start limiting ourselves, we lose creativity,” she says. “There’s this illusion of rules — like there’s a science to writing a radio hit. But that stuff will steal your self-worth. When we stopped chasing the formula, we made something that actually sounded like us.”
At the center of it all sits “Darkness Always Wins,” a slow-burning, spiritually bruised ballad that might be the best thing the band has ever written. “That was the first song we recorded,” Hale says. “We came in with all our notebooks and riffs, and Dave goes, ‘Nope. What have you got right now?’ The only thing I had written down was the phrase ‘darkness always wins.’” She and guitarist Joe Hottinger had been sitting on their porch talking about why evil seems to always get the upper hand. “Joe said, ‘Why does the darkness always win, man?’ And I wrote it down. That was it. That was all we had. Dave said, ‘Great. Let’s go.’”
The result is one of those songs that sounds eternal — like it’s been living in rock’s bloodstream for decades, waiting for someone to sing it. Hale hears the fear in her own voice on the recording. “You can tell we were nervous, like, ‘We’ve got to impress this guy.’ But when it came together, it was like the music told us what to do. We didn’t plan it. It just… became.”
She laughs when the word “classic” comes up. “That’s so kind. But when something like that happens, you don’t feel like you wrote it. It’s like you’re watching it come through you. You just hang on and try not to screw it up.”
By the end of the conversation, she’s back to that same theme — faith in chaos, finding meaning in noise. “Every time we’ve been backed into a corner,” she says, “something good has come out of it. You have to jump and hope you packed your parachute. And if you didn’t, you build one on the way down.”
Watch the full interview above and then check out the video below.
