Lzzy Hale nearly bangs her head off as she wails on her guitar, throwing herself to her knees and letting that unbelievable voice rip during crushing new Halestorm track Rain Your Blood On Me. She’s up quickly, striding around the stage like a war general, as 12,500 stunned Iron Maiden fans look on.
We’re in Budapest, for the first date of Maiden’s Run For Your Lives tour. Their fanbase is notoriously difficult to please – we once saw a member of Funeral For A Friend take a full pint to the face at a Maiden show in London - but Lzzy isn’t faced by crossed arms, grumpy faces or loaded projectiles. There are dropped jaws, wide grins and even a few fists pumping. It seems Lzzy and her bandmates came ready for a challenge.
“It’s my favourite thing, actually,” she beams, as we sit down to chat the following day. “It reminded me of when we opened up for Megadeth back in 2010 – notorious fans! They don’t care who the opener is, and even back then, it was kind of a game for me.
We were talking to the Iron Maiden crew last night, and they said, ‘We can’t believe it. There were no middle fingers, no coins being thrown, shoes being thrown, anything like that.’”
Given Halestorm are almost three decades in and legitimate arena headliners themselves at this point, is it not even a little bit annoying to still have to go out in front of stubborn rock fans and win them over?
“I really do love that!” she says. “At this stage in the game, we’ve been a band for almost 28 years. It’s very exciting to be opening up for a band where the majority of fans most likely have no idea who we are. That challenge to win them over is what we live for.”
And that right there is Lzzy Hale in a nutshell. Zero bullshit. No presumptions. A proper rock star without the ego. The heavy metal fanatic who started a band with her brother, drummer Arejay, at 13 years old, worked her ass off, made it big and doesn’t take a single second of it for granted. She walks into our interview looking every inch the ‘rock star’ part of that sentiment – black leather trench coat, heels, fingers adorned with rings – though it’s a mint tea she pops on the table rather than a Jack and Coke. More on that later.
We’re sitting on two stools in a large, open room backstage in the Papp László Sportaréna in Budapest. It’s the same venue where Halestorm blew away 12,500 impatient Iron Maiden fans last night; we’re surrounded by members of the metal legends’ entourage busily turning the place into a VIP area for this evening.
Supporting Iron Maiden was another milestone moment for Lzzy, who seems to be racking them up. Hell, at this point it feels like she’s ticking off side quests: over the past 12 months alone, on top of her Halestorm duties, she’s fronted Skid Row for a whole tour, chaired a Spotify Women Of Metal summit that got her face plastered over a Times Square billboard, contributed to an upcoming Judas Priest documentary, and earned the slightly strange honour of being the only woman invited to play Black Sabbath’s massive final show. Is she officially metal’s go-to personality right now?
“It’s truly incredible,” she says. There’s a pause, before she adds thoughtfully: “I think that the lesson to be learned is that you can’t spill yourself for someone else until you fill your own cup up first."
If that sounds like therapy language, it may well be: Lzzy has been having sessions since 2019, taking productive measures to process the mental health issues she has encountered for most of her life. Over the years, she’s publicly discussed her complex relationship with organised religion (grew up around it, distanced herself from it by the age of 14), her sexuality (she came out as bisexual on Twitter in 2014), her imposter syndrome (yup, rock stars get it too!) and her bouts of depression.
It helped her forge a deep connection with Halestorm’s fans, though that inevitably invited its own pressures. Now, she’s at a place where she feels comfortable being both a role model to her followers and a peer to many of her heroes – even if it’s taken plenty of work to get here.
“What I had to do in order to be comfortable in this role again,” she says, “is break everything down and more or less systematically rid myself of the things that no longer make me happy.”
Things like alcohol. Lzzy is 18 months sober at the time of our conversation, having decided to quit the booze for good in December 2023. Years of life on the road and indulging a few of those good ol’ rock star clichés had left her with a drinking problem that had escalated and led to some troubling behaviour.
Appearing on the Harder To Breathe podcast in April, Lzzy revealed that not long after she and partner/Halestorm guitarist Joe Hottinger had arrived back home in Nashville after the band headlined London’s Wembley Arena, she was found by Joe, totally shitfaced, crying and babbling incoherently in their bedroom. She had ‘rescued’ a dusty old bottle of Jägermeister that she’d found in their basement, washing it down with a four-pack of Angostura bitters.
“I was looking for an escape in all the wrong places,” she tells us now. “I saw myself in a way that I never wanted to be. I almost saw my nemesis in myself, a woman I did not want to become. I think that if I had gone any further… I don’t know what would have happened with my relationship with my bandmates, my relationship with myself. That was the peak of it all.”
Just down the corridor, we can hear Iron Maiden soundchecking for tonight’s second gig in this building. It’s named after László Papp, the undefeated Hungarian boxer who made history by winning three successive Olympic gold medals during the 40s and 50s.
Clearly, Lzzy is a fighter herself – she certainly knows a thing or two about getting back up after being knocked down. The day after that incident at her house, she decided to jack the booze in completely, and began the process of working through the latest bout of depression she had been covering up.
“I felt so guilty about it,” she says. “I mean, I’m living this unfathomable dream that I would have never even thought would have been possible when we first started the band. It was this battle in my head: ‘Why are you so depressed? Why are you frustrated? Why are you angry? This life is great! You could be working in an office somewhere!’”
Lzzy is talking about her own inner voice, but she could just as easily be referencing that ever-permeating preconception of rock star life, that it’s all fun and games, glamour and debauchery, and any musician found moaning about it must be ungrateful.
“What people don’t normally understand, when they’re looking from the outside, is that as much as this looks like a lot of fun, it’s a lot of hard work, and you have to put a lot of yourself into it,” she adds. “And if you’re not ready for certain challenges, you have to figure it out on your own, and there aren’t a whole lot of people to help you.”
If most people were either blissfully unaware or turning a blind eye to Lzzy’s situation during that 2023 tour, one group had noticed something was up and weren’t willing to let it slide: her fans.
“We were out in Europe, and there were eight young girls that were coming to about 10 shows in a row,” Lzzy explains. “They were buying into every meet and greet, and so we would see them every day. And after about the third show, they were lined up in the meet and greet, and they asked me if I was doing alright. And I said, ‘Oh yeah, I’m fine. I’m just tired, you know?’ They said, ‘We’ve seen you hundreds of times, and there’s a light behind your eyes that isn’t there right now.’
“The next day, they came to the meet and greet, and they each had a note for me. Each one of them, in their own way, had said in their note, ‘Hey, we don’t know what’s going on with you, but if you have to quit the tour, if you have to take a break for a while, if you have to figure yourself out, we’re going to be here for you.’”
It was an emotional breakthrough for Lzzy that deepened the connection between her and her fans even more. The following show, she invited the girls onto her bus, opening up about the depression she had suffered over the years and the manner in which it had reared its head again. But at that point, she still didn’t quite feel ready to take the necessary steps forward.
“For a while, I wasn’t sure if anything was wrong or if it was just me,” she explains. “I also was very afraid to ask for help, because I felt like if I was asking for help, that means that I had failed in my own internal compass and in policing myself. So in a way, I kind of had to get to that point in order to admit, ‘OK, I have to figure something out.’”
Luckily, when that breaking point hit in December 2023 and it was time for a reset, Lzzy did figure something out: she actually didn’t have to fight this battle alone. Her three bandmates – Joe, Arejay and bassist Josh Smith – were there for her immediately, and they let her know it.
“It wasn’t necessarily an intervention, but they were all like, ‘What is going on with you?’” she says. “When I was describing what was going on – and they’ve seen me in every iteration of my life, we’ve known each other for 22 years – they all said to me, ‘You do not have to carry this weight all by yourself. We can help you. We’re in this together. We’re still here, and we’re still brothers to you.’ And what I realised in that moment is that those men know me more than my own family.”
And so, bolstered by the support of her bandmates, Lzzy got stuck into processing her emotions via the same method she’s used since she was a young teenager: she wrote. And she wrote and wrote and wrote some more. By the time Halestorm went to Savannah, Georgia, to record a new album with heavyweight producer Dave Cobb, she was armed to the teeth with lyrics ready to drop and song ideas ready to roll, her experiences channelled into another set of ready-made, arena-proof Halestorm bangers. Except… not a single one of her ideas actually made it past the front door.
“I have a pile full of songs, and Joe’s got riffs for days,” she laughs. “And Dave sits us down. He’s like, ‘Oh, no, we’re not doing any of that. I want to start every day with a fresh idea, and while we are writing it, we’re going to hit record, and we’re going to record in real time.’”
It was a shock to the system. Just write all new songs from scratch? On the fly? It didn’t so much push Halestorm out of their comfort zone as blindfold them, spin them around 50 times, and move them to a new postcode.
“We were in this house in Savannah,” Lzzy says. “There were no wives, no girlfriends, no kids, no family. We were left unsupervised! The last time that we were ever like that was when we were about 19 years old, you know, without a crew, no managers, no nothing. I don’t know what happened, but in our minds, we went back to the beginning.”
If Lzzy was coming out of an existential crisis of her own, the band were about to have one too. Stripped of a battle plan and forced to tap into the energy that drove them all to make music in the first place, Halestorm found themselves attempting to, as Lzzy puts it, “rediscover the Big Why”.
“Why do you do what you do?” she explains. “Why do we still like each other? Why do we still do this? Why are we still fighting for this? All of those subjects were starting to come out of the woodwork, and so what we ended up discovering is that the entire world could burn, we could be the only people left on Earth, and we would still absolutely love each other and love what we do.
"We don’t need anyone else’s opinions, anyone’s guidance. We created this record fully trusting each other and trusting our gut.”
That record is called Everest: about as on-the-nose an allegory as you could hope for, and a title that represents not just Lzzy’s hard climb out of a dark place, but the band’s own challenging journey to reckoning with their place in the world after all these years together.
If you’re assuming that means a big, happy, triumphant ‘Fuck yeah!’ of an album, you’d best think again. Everest is comfortably the darkest, most challenging and most surprising thing Halestorm have ever put their name to.
“I realised that not everything has a shiny, white light at the end,” Lzzy says, when we put this to her. “This album is not necessarily an album of despair or an album of hope. It is reality.”
If Everest is Halestorm’s new reality, it certainly isn’t a dull one. It’s an extremely diverse record, channelling everything from the imperious stomp of 90s Metallica (Fallen Star), to swaggering glam metal (Rain Your Blood On Me, Watch Out!), to waltzy blues (Like A Woman Can), to a genuinely head-turning bit of System Of A Down worship (K-I-L-L-I-N-G).
Lzzy’s lyrics are as emotionally raw as ever. One moment she’s wrapping up righteous female rage in wardrum-banging poetry (‘Break the chain around my neck, scream my name in shades of red!’), the next she’s going fully existential as she ponders her own legacy (‘Will I leave behind the best of me?’). The common thread is that she has reaffirmed her willingness to pull no punches and tell her truth – something she says was consolidated by the conversation with those young girls on her bus.
“I must credit our fans for giving me that gift,” she says warmly. “Giving me permission to be myself, you know? The good and the bad and the ugly.”
You sense that this is a particularly important new chapter for Lzzy. Barely into her 40s, sober, and about to unleash what may just be her defining work, her determination to get back out there and blow more people away is tangible.
“I think it’s the ending of an era, but it’s also the beginning of a brand new one,” Lzzy nods. “I can feel it with my guys too. Everyone in Halestorm is so excited about what we’re doing. This album is laying the ground for whatever is going to happen. And we don’t really know what that is yet, but we’re looking at ourselves with new eyes.”
It’s all given her an excuse for a public refresh, of sorts. This year, she launched a new personal Instagram account, abandoning her old one of almost 650,000 followers and encouraging people to follow the “new” her. It was a surprising move for a successful, high-profile artist – one that she reveals “disappointed” a few people working with the band that couldn’t see the bigger picture, or what that refresh symbolises for her.
“It’s a strange thing to do!” she admits. “It was a move on my part to clean the slate and say, ‘OK, well, the past is the past.’ This is a new me, a new perspective. And in the wake of the album, I wanted to see how many people would follow me over and be OK if it wasn’t everybody. I liked the challenge to the public, but it was a challenge for myself too.”
And with that, as Lzzy bids us farewell with a friendly hug and strides off to prepare for another night of winning over stubborn metalheads, it appears we’ve come full circle. Another day, another challenge to conquer for one of modern heavy metal’s prize fighters.
This might be a bold new chapter, but in many ways, this is also the same Lzzy Hale as always. Except this time, it might just be Lzzy at her very best. Everest must be bricking it.
Everest is out now via Atlantic Records. Halestorm tour North America from September 11 and tour Europe and the UK from October 22. For the full list of dates, visit their official website.
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