Photo Credit: Jimmy Fontaine
Halestorm drummer Arejay Hale is all infectious smiles and visibly excited energy as he meets with Bring The Noise UK. We are chatting backstage at the OVO Hydro in Glasgow as we chew the fat together and break down his band’s brand new record, the art of song writing and also imagine giving a Halestorm classic the full Rage Against the Machine treatment.
“I challenge Rage Against The Machine to cover It’s Not You… I would love to hear Rage do a Halestorm song.” He pauses, laughs, then doubles down. “Just to hear Zach saying, ‘I’m in love with somebody… and it’s not you!’ That would be fucking sick.”
There it is. The giddy optimism. The grin as wide as the River Clyde which runs past the venue outside and the sense that, six albums deep, Halestorm aren’t slowing down. Instead they’re speeding up, changing lanes, ignoring signs, and stomping on the throttle into whatever sub-genre they fancy next. Arejay even jokes he is plotting to pitch the idea to Tom Morello at Download next summer, where Halestorm and the RATM guitarist will be sharing the bill come June. “Maybe I’ll pitch him the idea. Tom, come on. Call up Zach. Call up Brad. Just do it for us.”
A joke, maybe. But with Halestorm, implausible ideas have a way of becoming reality. The newly released sixth studio album, Everest, is the sound of a band who are comfortable in what they do and are flexing their musical muscles and edging into new territories.
“All the rules, all the systematic ways, all the processes that we learned to make records… we threw them right out the window.”
This wasn’t a gentle course correction. This was a demolition job on their own blueprint. Since the beginning, Halestorm have lived in a space between straight-shooting American hard rock and something more dangerous, more adventurous.
“On our first record, we kind of established our sound. We were like, okay, this is a lane that we can take. This works. Second record, we had to kind of follow it up, keep it within the frame. Into the Wild Life, our third record, we really tried to branch out and tried to get out of what we call the active rock scene, and try to get more into alternative.
“But it kind of was a mixed reviews for the fans. Nowadays, a lot of fans really love that record. But at the time, everyone was like, oh, this doesn’t sound like you. And it kind of threw some people off. But over time, the song I’m the Fire has become such a huge fan favourite. So Vicious, we were like, let’s go back to what we know.
“And Back from the Dead, of course, was like our post-COVID record. We were like, okay, let’s go into the album and make a really heavy rock record. But now we’re at record number six. And it’s like, okay, if we just fall into this, we just felt like at this point in our career, if we just fall into the same routine, it’ll probably start to get a bit boring for the fans, probably start to get a bit repetitive. I feel like when we start getting too comfortable, that’s when we have to shake things up. We have to try to challenge ourselves in a new way.”
It’s classic Hale logic: stagnation isn’t just a risk, it’s a creative enemy. And for him personally? “If I don’t feel like I’m challenging myself or I’m getting too complacent, then I feel like I’m doing something wrong.”
So Halestorm took a deep breath – and smashed the factory reset button. When Grammy-winning producer Dave Cobb came in, some fans scratched their heads. The man is synonymous with Americana, country, cinematic soundscapes – not metal, not hard rock, not the thunderous mania Arejay brings to the drum kit each night.
And that was exactly the point.
“I really loved working with Dave. He’s a prolific songwriter, great soundscape artist… he knows how to make really powerful cinematic music.”
More importantly, he didn’t do what many producers have done to Arejay over the years. “A lot of producers have tried to encourage me to simplify things and just play a rock beat… keep it safe, keep it radio-friendly. But people are looking for something fresh, something interesting.”
With Cobb, the band were free to experiment – not self-consciously, but instinctively, impulsively. “We decided to not mould the creative process to the pre-existing sound, to what our brand is, to what we think our audience wants to hear. Let’s be present. Let’s chase what’s getting us excited right now.”
The result is a Halestorm record that mirrors modern listening habits: varied, unpredictable, and exciting.
“It’s cool to see that the average music fan is open to a lot of different genres and a lot of different feels. That’s the way I am,” he revealed.
“That’s the way everyone that I know is. And I think just because you can listen to every type of music on your phone, you can switch from Stevie Wonder to Slipknot in five seconds. It’s not like you go to the record store and you go to your section and shop for your music.
“The reason that this record is so diverse was because we decided to not mould the creative process to the pre-existing sound, to what our brand is, to what we think our audience wants to hear. It’s like, no, let’s really live in the moment. Let’s be present and let’s just chase what’s getting us excited right now. And it turned out to be kind of a snapshot of where we are at as people in that moment.”
Several songs on Everest feel uncomfortably intimate, like reading the innermost thoughts and fears of the band. That’s by design. With fewer outside writers this time, much of the emotional weight came directly from the band themselves.
Arejay lights up when he talks about this part of the process. “It was probably the most personal record for me and for Lzzy and for all of us… It’s therapeutic to get personal things off your chest. That’s always been my therapy for keeping sane.”
For him, songs aren’t songs, they’re self-therapy. “When shit really bothers me or when life gets to feel too much, write it down. Put it into a song. Sing about it. It’s like this dark cloud you literally pull out of yourself.”
At the same time, he’s honest about the transformation that happens when a personal idea becomes a Halestorm song. “I’ll write a song that’s personal to me, but then if we have to put it through a Halestorm filter, we make changes to make it adaptable to whoever is singing.”
This is the engine of the band: emotion made universal, pain forged into catharsis, sweat turned into gasoline.
If the studio is where Halestorm reinvent themselves, the stage is where they self-immolate. Their live shows remain some of the rawest in mainstream rock and that’s partly because the band still don’t lean on backing-tracks. “We don’t use backing tracks at all… Every single band uses them now. And I’m not anti-tracks, it’s fine. But for us? If we started using playback, guaranteed it would go wrong.”
He laughs, because he knows it’s true. “Just with our raw setup, we can’t get through a single show without something blowing up or catching on fire or not working. No show is perfect, but that’s what makes it great.”
There’s a romantic madness to Halestorm’s live philosophy: imperfection as spectacle, chaos as authenticity. And fans feel it. You can’t fake danger. You can’t auto-tune adrenaline.
And so, back to Rage Against the Machine and this dream cover. Because beneath the humour is a genuine curiosity, a creative hunger to hear something familiar made alien, explosive, transformed. “They could just funk it up. Add some of those crazy Tom Morello riffs. I’d be so curious how it would work out.”
To be fair to Arejay, giving It’s Not You the full RATM treatment, funky riffs and singing from the soul with their trademark punchy angst, would be a sound to behold.
“Rage did a cover record, Renegades, and it’s awesome. I feel like as a true Rage Against The Machine fan, it might be blasphemous for me to say, but I think that their Renegades record might be my favourite.
“Because it sonically sounds so amazing. And I’m also a big hip-hop lover, so I love them applying that Rage sound into really awesome hip-hop songs. So I would love to hear Rage do a Halestorm song.”
Halestorm remain a band who still wants to know what happens when you push the button you’re not supposed to push. And a band always evolving, always striving to be better and we love them for it all.
