In a new interview with Meltdown of Detroit’s WRIF radio station, HALESTORM frontwoman Lzzy Hale spoke about what it has been like for her and her bandmates to perform live again during the pandemic. She said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “We did a quote-unquote secret show here in Nashville [in July 2021] at a local club as our first show back. It had been the longest I’ve ever gone without doing a live show, and my panic mode started at soundcheck. It wasn’t just, like, 10 minutes before we go on, ‘Oh, God.’ It was just all day of, like, ‘Oh my Gosh. We’re really doing this.’

“It feels so good to be doing shows again and it feels great to just see everybody in the audience really living in the moment,” she continued. “I feel like it’s different now in a strange way. Everything is a little elevated. No one’s chatting on their phone. Everyone’s going to a show like it’s gonna be their last show. It’s pretty incredible.”

HALESTORM will release its fifth studio album, “Back From The Dead”, on May 6 via Atlantic. The follow-up to 2018’s “Vicious” was produced by Nick Raskulinecz (FOO FIGHTERS, MASTODON, ALICE IN CHAINS) with co-production by Scott Stevens (SHINEDOWN, DAUGHTRY, NEW YEARS DAY).

According to a press release, “Back From The Dead” quickly evolved from songwriting exercises into a matter of survival for HALESTORM. Lzzy said: “We started writing this album about three months B.C. (Before COVID). Once we went into lockdown and were unable to perform and tour, I fell into a dark place and something of an identity crisis. This album is the story of me carving myself out of that abyss. It is a journey of navigating mental health, debauchery, survival, redemption, rediscovery and still maintaining faith in humanity.”

Last November, Lzzy told the 105.7 The Point radio station about the musical direction of the new HALESTORM material: “This album is absolutely a banger. It’s on eleven. We have really just kind of exceeded all of the energy that has come before on these albums, both technically, music-wise, vocally, drum, lyric-wise. I think because of the roller-coaster ride when we were making this record, and just through the pandemic and all the different phases of that, we just kind of looked at each other, like, if the future is unknown and we don’t know whether we’re actually going to be out and playing these things, everything has to be, like I said, at eleven. It’s HALESTORM elevated.”

According to Lzzy, she and her bandmates recorded the new HALESTORM album in a different way. “This is the first time that we’ve ever had dual producers,” she explained. “We went back with Nick Raskulinecz [who helmed ‘Vicious’]. And then I ended up doing my vocals with Scott Stevens from THE EXIES. He’s like a brother from another mother with me. We’ve written together before, and we’ve known each other for probably just shy of a decade now. He and I, we produced and did all the vocals for [HALESTORM’s recently released single] ‘Back From The Dead’ with each other, because I went out to L.A. And then we ended up sending it to Nick, and Nick’s, like, ‘This is just absolutely amazing. We have to do every song this way.’ So we kind of did it differently. We ended up with the bare bones of a demo. I ended up finishing all of my vocals — like dunzo — before we ended up building the track musically. So it’s kind of like building a pyramid upside down. But it ended up really just having this different energy, because what we were able to do with the lyrics and melody and all the vocals being done would really accentuate all of that — matching the theme to whatever I was singing about, but also just kind of really supporting the vocals musically when we went in to do the guitars and drums and bass. It’s so crazy — it definitely has this very forward, very aggressive nature to it because of the way that we did that.”

The “Back From The Dead” title track was released in August. The official music video for the song, directed by Dustin Haney (Noah Cyrus, Luke Combs) and produced by Revolution Pictures, featured Lzzy and the rest of the band in a morgue and cemetery somewhere between life and death.

Lzzy and her brother Arejay formed the band in 1998 while in middle school. Guitarist Joe Hottinger joined the group in 2003, followed by bassist Josh Smith in 2004.

In December 2018, HALESTORM was nominated for a “Best Rock Performance” Grammy Award for its song “Uncomfortable”. Six years earlier, the band won its first Grammy in the category of “Best Hard Rock/ Metal Performance” for “Love Bites (So Do I)”.

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Fan-filmed video footage of Geoff Tate’s performance aboard this year’s Monsters Of Rock cruise can be seen below.

Tate’s current tour is celebrating the 30th anniversary of QUEENSRŸCHE’s “Empire” and “Rage For Order” albums.

1986’s “Rage For Order” introduced a much more polished look and sound for QUEENSRŸCHE. The album featured keyboards as prominently as guitars, and the group adopted an image more closely associated with glam rock or glam metal than with heavy metal (of which glam metal was a subgenre). A video was filmed for the song “Gonna Get Close to You”, originally recorded in 1984 by DALBELLO.

Released in 1990, “Empire” included the hit ballad “Silent Lucidity”, which reached No. 9 on the Billboard singles chart, helped propel “Empire” to No. 7 on the album chart and earned two Grammy Award nominations.

Prior to the launch of the trek in early 2020, Tate told MisplacedStraws.com that he would take the “Empire 30th Anniversary Tour” to “as many countries as I can and playing the album in its entirety, which I’ve never done before. So that’ll be real fun. In fact, I think there’s some songs on that album that I’ve never, ever played live before, so it’ll be a treat — for me, as well, I think, for the audience too,” the former QUEENSRŸCHE singer said. “I’m really looking forward to that.”

Tate told Eonmusic that one song from “Empire” that was rarely performed live is “Anybody Listening?” “When QUEENSRŸCHE was together, we never really put that song in our set,” he said. “We just had a hard time playing it, for some reason; it just never jelled or felt right. And I’d really like to play that song again, and play it right.”

In April 2014, Tate and QUEENSRŸCHE announced that a settlement had been reached after a nearly two-year legal battle where the singer sued over the rights to the QUEENSRŸCHE name after being fired in 2012. Original QUEENSRŸCHE members Michael Wilton (guitar), Scott Rockenfield (drums) and Eddie Jackson (bass) responded with a countersuit. The settlement included an agreement that Wilton, Rockenfield and Jackson would continue as QUEENSRŸCHE, while Tate would have the sole right to perform the albums “Operation: Mindcrime” and “Operation: Mindcrime II” in their entirety live.

Tate was replaced in QUEENSRŸCHE by former CRIMSON GLORY singer Todd La Torre.

Geoff recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of “Operation: Mindcrime” on European and U.S. tours.

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Drummer Donald Tardy of Florida death metallers OBITUARY has confirmed to Finland’s Chaoszine that the band has completed work on its long-awaited new studio album. Regarding the musical direction of the follow-up to 2017’s self-titled effort, he said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “It is fucking awesome. It is OBITUARY, absolutely 100 percent, meat and potatoes, but with Ken’s [Andrews, lead guitar] influence and him being able to write a few songs with me on this one, he brings a much more old-school thrash metal feel. So it’s fresh, it’s killer, it’s exciting on some of those songs, but then also the meat and potatoes, there are some songs that are so heavy on this record, man. I’m so proud of it. I can’t wait for people to hear it. And the production — we recorded it at our studio and then we sent it off to Joe Cincotta, my boy who’s done the last four albums with us. He did an amazing job; the sound of this record is fantastic. I can’t wait for everybody to hear it. We’re working on the album cover right now. And we are now just waiting for the target date that we’re gonna release it.”

As for when fans can expect to get the new OBITUARY LP, Donald said: “Until this pandemic opens up Europe, we will not release this album until we are invited back to Europe. Because the only thing that albums are good for now, and some people won’t agree with this, especially fans, is that it’s there to get people talking about the band so when we get ready to go tour, we can make a living because nobody — and I don’t mean nobody as in zero percent — but the percentage of people actually walking to a Best Buy or walking to a store and physically buying one of my albums compared to 18 years ago, as you can imagine, is nil. So we have to wait for the prime opportunity to release this thing so everybody wants to go and get it. And the prime opportunity is when Europe is open, when America is open, we can release it and we can be in Europe and we can go bust our asses and hope that people go and buy the new album. ‘Cause everyone is listening to it, but we’re all listening to it on Spotify and on these streaming sites, and that doesn’t do musicians like myself, it doesn’t do us any good because we don’t get royalties from those companies.”

He continued: “The reality is we haven’t been to Europe in four years and they’re deserving of it as well. So we’re gonna wait so all of us around the whole world can celebrate this album with us properly where we can go do a world tour and promote it. So, you guys are gonna have to have patience. We’re gonna wait until Europe opens up.”

As previously reported, OBITUARY will embark on the “RedNeck Run III” spring 2022 U.S. tour with GRUESOME and 200 STABS WOUNDS. The trek will kick off on March 18 in Jacksonville, Florida and conclude on April 10 in Birmingham, Alabama.

Last March, OBITUARY frontman John Tardy told France’s United Rock Nations that the band had used some of the downtime during the coronavirus pandemic to work on material for a new studio album. “We’ve definitely been working on new tunes, and we’ve been taking our time,” he said. “We didn’t feel like releasing [a new album] now in the middle of the pandemic when you can’t go on tour and support it is not what we wanted to do, so we’re in no hurry. But by the time next year comes around, we’re gonna be hitting the road again. We’re getting tours set up, and we will be releasing another album next year before we hit the road and start touring again. So we are currently working on new material.”

Asked what fans can expect from the new LP, John said: “I think it’s just gonna sound like OBITUARY. [Laughs] You know us — we’re kind of cavemen; we don’t like to evolve too much. We like to change it up and do a little here and there, but we’re getting too old to change too much, I think. So as long as it’s heavy and pounding, then that’s what you can expect.”

Decibel Books has just released “Turned Inside Out: The Official Story Of Obituary”, the fully authorized biography of OBITUARY. In the book, David E. Gehlke — author of “Damn The Machine: The Story Of Noise Records” and “No Celebration: The Official Story Of Paradise Lost” — provides an unprecedented look at the death metal legends through all-new, in-depth interviews with bandmembers past and present, recording engineers, scene contemporaries and music industry veterans who’ve worked directly with the band throughout OBITUARY’s nearly four-decade career. Packed with hundreds of rare and never-before-seen photos, as well as a foreword from Max Cavalera (SOULFLY, SEPULTURA), the 328-page hardcover “Turned Inside Out: The Official Story Of Obituary” is exclusively available for order now via decibelmagazine.com.

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KIX guitarist Ronnie Younkins, who is unable to tour with the band because he has been placed under house arrest after repeatedly getting in trouble with the police, discussed his battle with alcoholism in a new interview with Adika Live!. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I’m just glad to be alive, and I’m glad that my daughter and my son and my wife talk to me. And I’m glad the guys in the KIX band still talk to me.

“The message that I have to share is that if you get sobriety, do everything in your power to stay there because if you go back out… The disease of alcoholism and drug addiction is progressive. It’s categorized as a disease. And it’s potentially fatal. This is a disease that causes poor behavior, bad behavior, insane behavior. I mean, I would become — it talks about it in the ‘Big Book’ of Alcoholics Anonymous — Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I would turn into Mr. Hyde. And even when I wasn’t drinking, the physiology of my brain was all messed up so I was always kind of distant from everyone and just not with it. I tried to straighten up and do shows and stuff, and the guys could tell I wasn’t playing up to par. I wasn’t kidding anyone; I was just kidding myself. And it took my third arrest and being locked down and put in jail and then to getting locked down — thank God — from jail into a rehabilitation center for six months. And I thanked the judge for locking me in there for six months because now I could drive to work and if I see a liquor store, I just go by and [think] ‘poison.’ Anything that would ruin my life — I don’t entertain the idea of a drink. I go to meetings every day. I try to share with others. I’m reading my ‘Big Book’. I’m working on step four right now, which is searching and personal and moral inventory of my life. It’s got to do with resentments, angers and fears. So I’m working on that right now. And I’m in a good place — I really am.”

Ronnie, who is being temporarily replaced in KIX by Bob Paré, an accomplished musician who studied at the Music Institute in Los Angeles and taught music theory and guitar at several institutions, including Western Maryland College and Maryland Institute of Music, continued: “I miss the guys in the KIX band and everything, but they got tired of putting up with my shit. They gave me chance after chance after chance. A guy named Bob Paré — a great guitar player, a friend of mine, a friend of the band, of course — has taken my place, and it’s all good. I miss ’em. I miss playing, I miss the whole ritual of it — working on the guitars, packing. I love traveling; I miss that.”

Circling back to his recovery, Ronnie said: “I do everything told and I do everything suggested. And I will have one year sober and clean on the 28th of this month. And that’s the longest I’ve had since my 21 years of sobriety. And I’m holding on to my dear life to that. So after the 28th of this month, I’ll work on my second year. One day at a time. It’s so true.

“I went through a lot of beautiful times in sobriety — a lot of beautiful things with my family, my daughter, my son and my wife. And the guys in the band talk to me; I’m grateful for that.”

Last month, KIX singer Steve Whiteman told Canada’s The Metal Voice that “[Ronnie] was pretty much being supervised in a halfway house for about a year. And I believe he’s finally got his freedom. So we’re just kind of waiting to see how he continues to recover,” he said. “Because it got ugly there for a while. And we wanna make that he’s got his family life together, his own life together, before bringing him back into this temptation that’s just around all the time. So we’re all pulling for him. We’re in touch with him. It’s a waiting game at this point — just to make sure that, unsupervised, he’s gonna be able to keep it together.

“I know the fans would love to have him back, and we would love to have him back, but it’s gotta make sense for everybody,” he continued. “And right now we’ve got the guy that had come in to help us out to replace Ronnie, Bob Paré, is just doing an amazing job, and I don’t wanna rock the boat at this point to take a chance. So it’s a wait-and-see game to see how he continues to recover and can he continue with his sobriety and get his life back together.”

Last November, Whiteman addressed Younkins’s condition in an interview with “The Chuck Shute Podcast”. He said: “Last I spoke to [Ronnie], he’s working, like, two normal jobs. He’s still living in a rehabilitation clinic, and he still has a ways to go. Even when he’s set free to go out into the world, like he did before, we still have to make sure that he’s gonna be able to stay clean and sober. But right now he seems like he’s doing really well. He’s following all the rules and he’s doing everything he can to get his life back in order.”

Steve went on to say that Ronnie was sober for 20 years before relapsing and spiraling back down into addiction.

“He got Hep C, and he had to use intravenous needles to battle the Hep C, before the newer treatment came out,” Whiteman said. “And we all think that that just kind of took his mentality back to the days when he was using. I mean, that’s speculation, and you’d probably have to ask him that, but it seems like that’s when things flipped for him.”

Whiteman previously discussed Younkins’s battle with addiction in a June 2021 interview with Sonic Perspectives. At the time, he said: “It’s been an up-and-down adventure with Ronnie over the past five or six years. Sometimes he doesn’t show up to gigs, and Brian Forsythe has to take over and play all the parts. Then he comes back for several months and does really well, only to fall off the wagon or get in trouble with the police. This last time, he got into trouble with the police and is currently in a halfway house under house arrest. That’s the biggest reason he is not out with us now. We were looking at Bob Paré a couple of years ago when Ronnie was going through a bad stretch, but Ronnie bounced back. When he shows up, he does great, so we didn’t make the move back then. This time we were forced to.”

Whiteman clarified: “I’m not saying that Ronnie is out of the band. We are just saying [he is not gonna tour with us] until he gets it together [and] his family and these people that are helping him say he is good to go. We are not going to bring him in until he is ready. He has shown in the past he can’t be sober on the road. Being out there in a rock and roll band is a very bad environment.”

He added: “We have a long history of 40 years together. You want to give him the benefit that he is going to recover and do well. There have been so many times over the last five or six years [when] we didn’t know if he was going to make it.”

Younkins previously opened up about his drug addiction five years ago, saying that his “disease had gotten worse” after he relapsed several years earlier following two decades of sobriety.

Younkins missed a KIX concert in Pennsylvania in March 2017 when the rest of the group was unable to reach him. He was eventually found “not in great condition and very upset,” according to TMZ. A month later, his bandmates revealed that he was “headed to a rehab facility” and promised that his spot in KIX would be “waiting for him” once he was ready to resume playing with the group.

While Younkins was in rehab, he took time out to join his KIX bandmates for a performance in June 2017 at the Sweden Rock Festival, where he gave a wide-ranging interview to Metal Rules that also touched upon his continued battle against substance abuse.

Speaking about his health, Ronnie said: “My disease has gotten worse. I had 21 years of sobriety at one point. Got sober and cleaned up in 1989, but I’d get on… A long story short, what led me back out was complacency in my program. I wasn’t doing enough of my work for the AA program like I did in the early years. Then I went on Hepatitis C treatment, or they should call it punishment, the old one that has many side effects, in 2010. One of them being insomnia, and the doctor put me on Ambien, and it fucked me up. It’s a sleep drug, and I got hooked on it, and then I wasn’t working the program, like with my mom’s death — I worked through that at ten years sober. I worked through that with my sponsor. [My] dad died, like, in 2012. Some other shit had happened, and I worked through [it], and some serious things happened.

“We all have issues,” he continued. “We all have shit happen in our lives and, you know, I worked through them in the program, but my when my father died, and I was complacent in the program, and I was already high on this fucking Ambien. I said, ‘Fuck it.’ And, I went out, and I started doing heroin and cocaine again within a month after my dad’s death, and it’s been nothing but downhill since. I’ve been through two rehabs, [in] 2014 [and] 2015.”

Drug and alcohol rehab statistics show that the percentage of people who will relapse after rehab and even a period of some recovery ranges from 50% to 90%.

Most people do not manage to quit their addiction with their first attempt. They may try and fail a number of times before they manage to secure lasting sobriety.

For addicts that fall back into drug use, there is no guarantee that they will ever be able to stop again; their relapse may turn out to be a death sentence.

Over time, the life of the addict tends to deteriorate. This means that when people relapse, they may be going back to a life that is even worse than before.

Bob was a session musician for several independent label releases, and has spent most of his long career performing live in the Maryland and Washington, D.C. area with various bands, including FORCER, EVER RISE, PROJECT: EUPHORIA and, most recently, the RUSH tribute band SUN DOGS with KIX bassist Mark Schenker.

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