Listen: Halestorm Covered Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning”

My brief tenure working at Atlantic Records overlapped with the release of Halestorm’s first full album in 2009. I’d enjoyed their One and Done EP previously, and when the A&R staff first played the new album for the key marketing staff at a meeting I remember being taken aback at how slick they’d gone with the production vs. the relative grit of the EP. I thought they’d fucked it up, they ruined it, they took away its balls, and that the band would flop in the radio rock game.

Boy, was I wrong. Halestorm are now one of the biggest active rock bands in the world, and I’ll shamefully eat a bag of dicks on that one. (At least I was right about Spotify, though! Totally worth the ten-minute tirade about it that Julie Greenwald screamed directly at me in front of all the department heads.)

Anyhoo, Halestorm just released ReAniMate 3.0: The CoVeRs eP, their third such compilation of other bands’ tunes, and this time around they tackle Whitesnake, Sophie B. Hawkins, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Twenty One Pilots, Soundgarden and Metallica. I’m quite enjoying hearing Lzzy Hale belt out David Coverdale’s parts on “Still of the Night,” but since Metallica get more clicks than Whitesnake you get the above headline, and you can stream Halestorm’s version of “Ride the Lightning” below. It’s a fairly by-the-numbers cover — the band doesn’t take any great liberties with the arrangement — but, once again, Hale’s voice adds a whole new flavor to the thing.

[via The PRP]