Halestorm pick their five most underrated rock and metal bands

Halestorm pick their five most underrated rock and metal bands

If 2024 had ‘Brat summer’, then 2025 may well be on the cusp of ‘Halestorm summer’. When I interview frontwoman Lzzy Hale and lead guitarist Joe Hottinger at the Gibson Garage in London, the Pennsylvania hard rockers are about to enjoy several career milestones. The day after we talk, they’ll support Iron Maiden at the 75,000-capacity London Stadium, and the weekend after that they’ll perform at Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath’s blockbuster farewell show. Oh, and on 8 August, they’ll release Everest: comfortably the best album of their 15-year recording career so far.

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“We’re peaking right now,” Hottinger laughs when I mention the stacked schedule his band have for the coming weeks. “It’s all downhill from here.”
If Everest receives the goodwill that it deserves, then hopefully not. On their sixth full-length, Halestorm eschew the trappings of US radio rock without sacrificing their melodic punch. The songs are heavy, passionate jams with an improvisational spirit, achieved by the fact they went into the studio with producer Dave Cobb with nothing written down.
“There is a looseness to it,” Hale says. “I think – given the circumstances and the fact that we were forced to live in the moment, trust ourselves, trust our guts and make decisions – we stopped ourselves before we were getting bored with something or something was getting too comfortable. In essence, that’s what live music is all about for us anyway.”
That verve quickly appears on opener Fallen Star, when Lzzy cackles and screams “Kick it!” before she and her bandmates launch into one of the nastiest riffs of their lives. Combine that with the searing lead lines of I Gave You Everything and the lung-popping shouts during Watch Out!, and you get an album that finally captures how raucous this foursome are in the live arena.
Lzzy Hale and Joe Hottinger performing at Black Sabbath’s final concert in 2025. Image: Alison Northway
On paper, Cobb seems like a wildcard pick for the producer of such an unapologetically rock’n’roll project. Though he’s produced Rival Sons and Greta Van Fleet in the past, he’s mainly known for working with such country-pop superstars as Chris Stapleton and Brandi Carlile. I ask what made him the man for the job of overseeing Everest.
“I love the Chris Stapleton record,” says Hottinger, “and Brandi Carlile is just a monster. Every time I fall in love with a record, I see his name and I’m like, ‘That fucking guy again!’”
“We’d have conversations with Dave and ask, ‘How did you make this or that work?’,” Hale adds. “He’d be like, ‘That was just the vibe on that day. We were literally living in the moment.’ For us, no matter what genre, I think that that’s just a good divining rod to be guided by.”
For all the rambunctiousness that Everest smacks the listener with, the album lyrically alternates between rock star pageantry and affecting levels of introspection. On lead single Darkness Always Wins, Hale cries, “We are fighters, holding up our lighters!”: a line almost definitely written with the intention of getting phone torches during their arena shows. Similarly, K-I-L-L-I-N-G is a barnstormer with a spell-along hook that anyone can quickly get caught up in.
On the other end of the spectrum, though, are lyrics as personal as those on Broken Doll, where Hale laments previous, toxic relationships. “I still believed the lies we shared, shattered dreams beyond repair,” she sings. Like a Woman Can is a defiant declaration of the singer/guitarist’s bisexuality, while How Will You Remember Me? finds her asking the lofty question of what her legacy will be after she dies.
“I was tired of what I had created in the past – this pedestal, the idea of me – and ready to say things that way that I actually feel them,” Hale explains. “I don’t have to have all the answers and everything doesn’t always have to be okay. I feel like, in past years, especially after fame happened and all of a sudden you’re a role model, I needed to be a beacon of hope for everybody. I wrote all these songs that said, ‘It’s gonna be okay,’ but that’s not reality. We don’t know whether everything is going to be okay.”
As Halestorm prepare to put out their best music yet and get ready for a summer that will surely only make their star burn brighter, I turn the conversations to bands who haven’t had that level of fortune and attention. Below, you’ll find Halestorm’s picks for great rock and metal bands that should have become household names but, for whatever reason, unjustly fell short of megastardom.
Halestorm. Image: Press
Sevendust
Lzzy: “They’re an incredible band, but they’ve always been notorious for, like, everybody that’s ever opened for Sevendust has gone on to do great things. They’re kind of the springboard for that. [1999 album] Home was the thing that knocked me out of my parent’s generation of music. I was listening to Judas Priest and Alice Cooper and Dio and all of that, and then Home came out, and there’s a song called Licking Cream with Skin from Skunk Anansie on it. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, girls can sing this type of music! There’s hope for me!’
“I remember meeting them: I had been a fan for a little while and then we went to the NAMM convention in the States. They had a small gig there and somebody got me in. They were the sweetest men in the world! A couple months later, they had a show in Lancaster, Pennsylvania at the Chameleon Club. They remembered us, invited us onto their bus and took our demo CD. They played one of our songs through the PA right before they went on! I remember turning to my little bro, just like, ‘Well, if Sevendust think we’re cool enough to have our song played in front of their audience, maybe we got something here.’”

Priestess
Joe: “They’re a band from the very early 2000s that never got too huge. They did some touring and I think they made two records. I still love that band. They have a record called Hello Master and I found a vinyl of it, an original pressing, at a shop in Nashville for like 20 bucks. It melted my brain! How they started that record is some of the inspiration for how we started this new record, because it’s just a killer riff that goes on for too long. Haha! It’s in a different time signature and I was like, ‘That’s brilliant!’ It was one of my favourite records coming up.”

The Divinyls
Lzzy: “They’re an overlooked punk band that were only ever known for [1990 single] I Touch Myself, and the rest of their albums sound nothing like that. They’re this crazy, high-energy Police-meets-old-school-punk kind of band. Nobody ever really digs deeper than that one hit they ever had.
“I got into them kind of by accident. I realised later, ‘Oh, they’re the I Touch Myself band.’ The lead singer [Chrissy Amphlett] ended up dying many years ago, but they were one of those bands that opened up for everybody and then never really got their due, except for that one song. It was completely unhinged, amazing vocal prowess. The guitars were really interesting. You could tell that they were very jazz-influenced, but then they all got into punk bands when they were teenagers.”

Killing Joke
Joe: “The record that got me into them was the one Dave Grohl was on [2003’s Killing Joke]. That got me into Killing Joke, that was my introduction. Don’t they have a songwriting credit on Come as You Are or something? [Nirvana’s riff was strikingly similar to the one in 1984 single Eighties. Killing Joke were reportedly annoyed about it, but didn’t take legal action – Legal Clarification Ed]
“I discovered them through that record because it was on a random playlist or something, and I heard it and I was thinking, ‘That sounds like fucking Dave Grohl – what are we listening to?!’ Then I went deeper and deeper and I bought the record. It was just on for, like, a year and a half straight.”
Lzzy: “I’m definitely a fan. It’s just the energy of a song like Asteroid and the personality. There are certain people who are able to exude that kind of energy vocally where you get to know who they are. You’re just like, ‘Man, I know everything about you just from that run!’”

Mrnorth
Joe: “They were Irish boys and they made a record on a big label [2004 debut album Lifesize was released by RCA]. I think they did some pretty good touring. The vocals were soaring, like Jeff Buckley, but they were a rock band. Lifesize is a beautiful record. They had a shot, I guess, but it didn’t quite go their way. We’d see them play all the time at Grape Street pub in Philadelphia. They were so good live!”
Lzzy: “Their lyrics were pure poetry. They took you to a different place. The words were like visuals. He [singer/guitarist Colin Smith] had a way of taking his surroundings – there was a lot of talk about trees and nature – but then relating them to one’s inner self. I remember thinking, ‘How do people think that way?!’”

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