Mojo Rising

Playing Fast, Fierce And Loud, A Resurgent Lzzy Hale And Joe Hottinger Find Redemption On Halestorm’S Cathartic New Album, Vicious

- Jonathan Horsley

Whether your creative crisis comes in the form of a purgatorial funk, in which no good ideas are forthcoming, or guised as a mushrooming self-doubt, with a million angsty panics infesting your head like termites, it comes, and when it does there’s no escaping it. No one is immune and so there are all kinds of motivational materials to help you pull through; bromides such as ‘Perfect is the enemy of done,’ and so on. And if it gets really bad, well, there are TED talks, happy pills and yoga. But, if there’s a lesson to be taken from speaking to Halestorm’s guitarist/vocalist Lzzy Hale and guitarist Joe Hottinger about the writing and recording process for the hard-rockers’ fourth album, Vicious, it’s that sometimes you just have to be told what to do. Enter, Nick Raskulinecz...

Having produced albums for Alice In Chains (see p34), Rush and Deftones, Raskulinecz’s ear for box-office rock tone is unimpeachable, but he also knows when a band aren’t hitting their straps and how to get them going again. The songs Halestorm had written while touring 2015’s Into The Wild Life weren’t working so he told them so. The band knew that already; they just needed to hear it from someone else. “I wanted to just write some fucking songs and get a record out as fast as we can; keep this train rolling,” says Hottinger. “That was summer, 2016, and so between then and December we ended up writing 10, 15 songs. They were good, y’know. It would have been just a fine Halestorm record but we knew it wasn’t [right] . . . Like, you try to convince yourself. But we were rehashing the same subjects, unexciting guitar parts . . . ”