Metal Anarchy

During an interview with TellUs Rock, Halestorm drummer Arejay Hale offered an update on the band’s new album. According to him, the group are “kind of in the infant stages right now where [they are] just kind of putting ideas out.”

Hale said the following:

“We’re just kind of in the infant stages right now where we’re just kind of putting ideas out, laying them down, tracking them, getting the songs and ideas together.

There’s a process to making an album where we don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel until we’re well into it and we’re, like, ‘Okay, now we kind of know what we’re going for, what we want it to sound like.’ But we’re just kind of… It’s the creative purge era now where we’re just kind of like letting it all out, putting it down, throwing it up against the wall and seeing what sticks. And then, of course, there’s also a lot of promotion that goes behind making an album. So even if we finished it tomorrow, who knows how long it would take for it to actually come out? So I’m hoping to get music out, if not next year, hopefully 2025, I’m hoping. If we’re going by the same routine…

It sucks, ’cause the ‘Back From The Dead’ album came out so late because of the pandemic. So I was kind of hoping we could make up for lost time by putting the next album a little bit earlier. But that’s still up in the air right now. So just keep an eye out.”

He also added the following when asked about the band’s writing process:

“Oh, it’s a lot of everything. Definitely during the pandemic, we did a lot of writing on our own ’cause that’s all we could do. Every single day I woke up, poured myself a cup of coffee, opened up my laptop, grabbed an acoustic guitar, grabbed a microphone and just started writing. Just get it out. For anything — for HALESTORM, for [my side project] KEMIKALFIRE, or even just for myself. Just writing music for the sake of writing and just trying to sharpen that tool, flex that muscle a little bit. That was my main objective during the pandemic. I jumped on the opportunity where I was in the same place for that long. Usually off time is a couple of weeks and we’re on tour again. So the fact that we weren’t on tour for several months, it really gave me the chance to try to get better at songwriting and singing and all that. So, that was a big process. But when it comes to every album, it’s always different. Sometimes we’ll all split up and write with a bunch of co-writers or we’ll bring a co-writer in to write with us, or we’ll just go in the studio, the four of us and a producer, or we’ll just like lock ourselves in a basement, the four of us. Just as long as we keep on staying proactive and keep on writing, then eventually something’s going to happen. You have to just kind of trust the process that the first couple of things you write aren’t gonna be good, but eventually you’ll get to the point where you hit your stride and you start writing things that you’re really excited about.

This last couple of weeks where we started writing together, it’s been like kind of the easiest, which is a little worrisome. It’s, like, ‘Okay, is it easy because we’re getting better? Or is it easy’ cause the ideas aren’t very good?’ I don’t know. It’s a lot of questions. But if I put my objective hat on and I listen to the stuff that we’re writing, it sounds good to me. I think it sounds pretty cool. And, yeah, it was just a very fun, easy process. The four of us got away for a little bit, stayed at this cool little lake house, and just started, every day, just writing for hours and hours, tracking it and seeing what comes. And so it was a lot of work, but it was actually, like, one of the more enjoyable writing processes that I can remember, ’cause it just felt very relaxed. It very nice.”

[via Blabbermouth]