Halestorm’s Back From the Dead: The Return to the Room

Halestorm’s Back From the Dead turns isolation into a record built for company, with its most revealing moment waiting at the end.

The most revealing decision on Back From the Dead is its ending. After an album full of forceful declarations, Halestorm leave the listener with “Raise Your Horns,” a piano-led song that allows Lzzy Hale’s voice to carry the weight. The quieter setting changes what the familiar gesture means. Raising a hand can be a celebration, but it can also be an acknowledgement that you are still here and could use some company.

The album grew out of the interruption of the pandemic. Hale has described losing the movement and purpose supplied by touring and confronting the uncomfortable question of who she was without it. That context helps explain the record’s appetite for contact. Its large choruses are designed to make a private feeling answerable by other people.

The title track establishes that impulse immediately. The performance is deliberately excessive, with the band giving its declaration of survival a physical scale. As an opening statement, it is effective because it gets to the point. There is little distance between the feeling being expressed and the force used to express it.

The risk is obvious: a whole album pitched at that level could become tiring. A powerful vocal needs changes of context if its power is going to keep meaning something. The record’s better decisions involve perspective and sequencing as much as volume.

“The Steeple” makes the audience part of the song’s subject. Hale has explained its emphasis on the community of a live show, and the gathered voices suit that purpose. The religious imagery gives a familiar concert experience a recognisable shape: people leaving their separate lives for a little while and finding a shared language.

“Wicked Ways” offers a more complicated kind of self-acceptance. In discussing it, Hale included the parts of herself she dislikes rather than presenting confidence as proof of innocence. That distinction improves the record. Accepting responsibility for your difficult qualities is more demanding than announcing that everybody else has misunderstood you.

“Bombshell” supplies a useful lesson in musical patience. Joe Hottinger has described an arrangement that stays rooted in one chord before allowing a change in the final chorus. Holding something back can make a release feel larger. It is a reminder that an album associated with sheer vocal force also relies on decisions about tension and timing.

The move from “Psycho Crazy” into “Raise Your Horns” is the record’s clearest demonstration of range. Hottinger has singled out that pairing, and the contrast gives both songs a stronger identity. The wildness has an aftermath; the piano has something substantial to settle after.

Some of the album’s declarations use the broad language common to modern hard rock. Those lines are easy to gather around, though they can make separate emotional situations feel interchangeable. The performances are often more individual than the statements themselves. More small, awkward details would give certain songs additional depth.

Even so, Back From the Dead understands the appeal of a band playing as though an audience is within reach. Its strongest moments turn the wish to endure into the wish to reconnect. The final song leaves that connection open enough to include the listener who has no triumphant announcement to make.

For the later chapter, read the review of Everest, where Halestorm become more willing to let their questions remain unresolved.

Start with: “Back From the Dead,” “The Steeple,” and “Raise Your Horns.”

• Apple Music: release information and Lzzy Hale’s commentary.
• Metal Hammer: Joe Hottinger’s track-by-track guide.
• Guitar.com: Halestorm on writing and recording the album.

Explore more music reviews from The Indigo Chronicle

READ NEXT