WSOU's Valentino Petrarca recently conducted an interview with HALESTORM drummer Arejay Hale. You can now listen to the chat using the SoundCloud widget below. Speaking about the more aggressive musical direction of HALESTORM's latest album, "Vicious", Arejay said: "I think with every record, when we go in the studio, we just kind of try to find our rhythm. This one, when we finally felt like we hit our stride and we were ready to have a greater understanding of what the overall theme of the album was gonna be and what we needed to bring to the songs, it started coming together very naturally. It just kind of took us a long time to get to that point — I think mostly just because this was our first record where we have really hardly any outside writers involved. We pretty much wrote all the songs ourselves together in the studio. So it was harder in the sense that it was a lot of hours and a lot of time just kind of sitting in the studio and throwing ideas together and getting frustrated. But then, as soon as we finally had that light bulb moment where we were, like, 'Okay, now we can kind of feel what we wanna bring to this album,' then it started coming together very quickly. And I think a lot of that had to do with our producer, Nick [Raskulinecz], who was just a great energy and a great vibe — just to help keep us in the right mindset and keep us from getting too frustrated." Asked if it was easier or harder making "Vicious" after the commercial success of HALESTORM's previous record, 2015's "Into The Wild Life", Arejay said: "I guess a little bit of both. Like I said, it was easy as soon as we figured out how to do it, but leading up to it, we were just kind of, 'Oh, gosh! The heat is on now. The pressure is on.' We had a pretty good debut record, and then the second record was the one that got us the Grammy, got us our first gold record, for our single 'I Miss The Misery'. And also the first two records went gold eventually, shortly after that. And then the third record, we kind of went a little left field, and it was cool and it was exciting — it was a fun musical adventure for us — but I think just knowing our history with our fans, and having a broader understanding of what they want from us, I think one of the objectives, going into the record, was trying to not forget those fans — those old-school fans that have been with us from the beginning — and try to do something new and fresh but also have the same kind of flavor for all of them. 'Cause our entire career has been a slow and steady pace. We're not going for shoot-straight-for-the-top status; it's more or less just maintaining and being able to continue our career and doing what we do." "Vicious" was released in July via Atlantic. The disc was recorded last year at Nashville, Tennessee's Rock Falcon recording studio.
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