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Lacuna Coil has a brand new album coming out called Sleepless Empire, which will be released on February 14 from Century Media Records. The band has taken their signature sound up a notch, with those dark, jarring, yet familiar, and lovingly composed juxtapositions of beautiful vs. dangerous. Aesthetic and sensual, the Lacuna Coil musical tidal wave will engulf you and have you craving more. I am sure you have already had a taste if you are a fan, of the five singles that have been released, however that’s a mere peek into what the rest of the album has in store. Also two guest vocalists appear, something Lacuna Coil has never done before. The new album is comprised of 11 tracks; each one is a richly textured soundtrack to a specific time and place. With “Sleepless Empire”, that place is dark, cinematic, and unmistakably true to the unique characteristics that have given Lacuna Coil such a celebrated entry in the annals of heavy music. 

Earlier this week I sat down with vocalist/lyricist Andi Ferro, songwriter, composer, one of the masterminds of the band Lacuna Coil for the first time since I interviewed him on Gimme Metal a few years ago. 

Alex: So tell us about the writing. When did the writing start for this record? Was it right after the remake of Comalies?

Andi: Yeah, absolutely. We did that to celebrate the 20th anniversary of our classic record Comalies. So we deconstructed and rebuilt it with a more contemporary sound, a classic record, just as a tribute. We didn’t want to do just a new mastered version, which will do something a bit more interesting for the fans. So we did that, and that I think brought us in a mood to restart songwriting properly after the pandemic, after the year of not doing much at home. And so we restarted working, let’s say a year and a half ago, more or less, and focusing on the new songs and visualizing the new concept, the new title for the record, and being inspired again. But it took a while. It took us a while before we’ve been able to do that.

Alex: It was a beautiful job you guys did on Comalies. Fantastic remake. It really gives that whole album a whole new dimension. This is a reset, now you’re starting fresh with a new album.

Andi: Yes. I think it was the right idea to do that, not only to offer something a little extra to the fans, but also to go back in the practice room together, go back in the studio without the same pressure as going to work to album number 10, which is Sleepless Empire. So we didn’t feel ready, and so we waited, and that really helped. And now we are very proud of the result of Sleepless Empire, and we’re really excited about getting to start a tour for the album, getting to present the songs to the people, so we’re very excited and curious to see their reaction.

Alex: It’s going to be coming up pretty soon. It’s going to be here before you know it. You’re probably going to start rehearsal soon, no?

Andi: Oh, yeah. I think in a couple of weeks we’re going to start to rehearse, and then we start a tour in South America first in the beginning of March. And then we’re going to, after South America, Honduras, Mexico, and then the States and Canada with Machine Head and In Flames and Unearth for the months of April and May around the States.

Alex: You are going to be here in New York, at the Brooklyn Paramount April 23rd.

Andi: Yeah, actually we never played that venue. And a friend of mine that lives in New York, he told me it’s a great venue.

Alex: It’s a completely restored theater that was sitting there for a long time, closed. And they redid the whole thing. It’s beautiful, beautiful theater. Everything is brand new. Beautiful place. You’re going to love it.

Andi: We actually will come to New York even before, because we have our warehouse for the gear in New Jersey, so we’re going to be in New Jersey before we go to South America. Prepare all the gear, fly to South America, then the bus is coming to pick us up the gear, and we meet the bus in the West Coast to start the Machine Head tour.

Alex: The first time I saw Lacuna Coil was in 2003 in Brooklyn at L’Amour. Type O Negative and Lacuna Coil, two nights in a row.

Andi: That’s still one of my favorite tours we’ve ever done. The Type O family welcomed us so gratefully, and obviously it was one of the big inspirations that we had to start to play the more dark side of metal, the slower, darker side of metal. And now to this day, it’s still one of my favorite bands, and we’re still in touch with Kenny and Johnny, and we have a crew member in common, so we still have a big legacy with the Type O family, and we will always have.

Alex: Johnny’s a Brooklyn boy. I’m friends with him a long time too, man. He’s a good guy. I knew Pete too. Pete was a very cool dude. He used to hang out at L’Amour because that was a Brooklyn club, and they played there a lot. So he was there all the time, and you couldn’t miss him because he was 10 feet tall.

Andi: Actually the very first time I was in New York, he was on the tour, our very first North American tour with Moonspell from Portugal. We were touring only two weeks. It was coast to coast basically. And we played at L’Amour with Moonspell, and Type O toured with Moonspell, they opened for Type O in Europe before that tour. So Pete came out to say hi to the Moonspell guy, and that’s the very first time I met him. It was probably 2001, I believe.

Alex: Tragic his life was cut short. I think a lot of people would have appreciated Type O Negative even more if he had been able to write more songs and make more music.

Andi: But they do have an impact anyway. Obviously they never became Slipknot or something like that, but I think for people that like to research a little bit their metal. Type O, they will always be a milestone. I know people all around the world that love Type O Negative.

Alex: Hell yeah, that is very true. The album Sleepless Empire has a lot of positive messages in it. A message of resilience. Time is what life is made of, right? That’s how I look at life. It’s made up of time. So how you spend your time is a really important thing. And in the track Gravity, there is the inevitability of fate and how you use your time wisely, and your writing in this album really puts together a human condition in the present day right now with the technology and social media and all that kind of stuff, where everybody’s getting wrapped up in that and losing themselves as human beings. So tell us about how you came with that philosophy for this album.

Andi:Basically the main topic around the album, around the title is the observation of reality, as you say, and especially being a little older, we’ve lived through the switch between the analog world and the digital era. We’re not kids, so we haven’t grown with our phones in our hands all the time, but the new kids, they do grow. And even if we have experienced a different life, we still go on the phone all the time, even at night. So that’s how we came up with the title because we live in this huge empire with all this possibility, connectivity, internet, social media, streaming services, Netflix, all that stuff. But we are always zombies in front of this phone, and we miss sometimes the real life. We get lost into too much offering, and we live very uncertain times in a way.

So we felt that was a good topic, but it’s not specifically to criticize the way it is. It is the way it is, and we are also living in this way. We’re not saying we’re better than the youth because we don’t do this. We do the same, so it’s the same. But it’s definitely something to pay attention to and find also some time to breathe and stay away from … It’s good to be on social media. We use it a lot for the band, but it’s also good to understand that you don’t need to live all your life on social media. There are certain things that it’s worth showing, certain things that should never be shown, and you should keep it for yourself and leave it and enjoy it instead of being there all the time.

So that was the message, more or less. Then every song goes its own way, obviously. It’s not a concept album in the sense that it’s a unique story. It’s mostly a unique topic like a soundtrack for a movie, but different little stories inside there.

 

Alex: Each song stands on its own, Oxygen, Gravity. In terms of the song writing, do you still write the same way, or have you developed a different method over the years that you’ve crafted? When Cristina and you get together and write parts for each other kind of thing to see if something might fit that she might be able to sing or something will fit that you might be able to handle? Does that kind of thing still happen?

Andi: Yeah, more or less the same. It’s always the three of us, me and Cristina mostly the vocal lines and lyrics and Marco, the bass player, doing 99% of the music. Then everybody, obviously when we eat the studio, the drummer can make his own fields or arrangements just getting along with the music. But we mostly, the three of us write the core of the record. The method is more or less the same, but obviously we try also little things to keep it fresh, to try and go places we haven’t gone, and every record you do you understand even more what’s important. The performance, I think it’s the most important thing. So it doesn’t matter if you are perfectly in tune or perfectly in time. As long as the performance is convincing and strong, then everything else you can fix it somehow a little bit. But if you don’t have a strong performance, that’s going to make the difference during the recordings.

And sometimes even for us, when we record a demo and we have no pressure in our own little studio, we do some takes that we can’t duplicate in the studio. Because the one day you feel perfect with your voice, with everything with the relaxation, so you can’t replace this in the studio. Sometimes we keep some parts from the demos because even if you try 50 times, you don’t capture the same take anymore because it’s a different day. The voice is not as good or you’re not relaxed because you are in the booth in the studio, so you’re not able to … Even a great singer like Cristina, she’s also has this, sometimes the demo, it still sounds better than the record. And it is what it is, but it’s good. You learn. The more you do it, the more you learn, the more you balance the way we use the two voices. So it’s always a great learning process, and I think we improve it every time because we still have passion about recording a new album.

Alex: What do you like to do on your downtime? What’s your best way of relaxing?

Andi: I have a lot of passion. We’re all very nerdy in the band, so we like video games, board games, movies, TV shows, comic books. So we do a lot where I go see a lot of exhibitions, art exhibitions, photographs. I like to do sports. I go to the gym a couple of times a week, if I can, to keep in decent shape. I like to watch sports with my friends, hang out with my wife, try to see the family, take the nephew out for shopping or try to be with the family as much as … I still have my parents, so I still like to spend some time with them, help them out, go to dinner with them, try to do what I can do when I’m on tour. But we have a lot of passion and not enough time to follow all of them, but we try to.

I still have to get some more tattoos, but I never have time to go, or I know I have to dedicate some time to do it, some energy. And especially when we have a new album coming out, there’s a lot to do that it’s focusing on that and not so much to do on it, especially because I do also all the bureaucratic side of things, not just the music. And we have to do a lot of meetings just for financial things, logistics, stuff like that, that has nothing to do with art, but it still has to be done. But I try to follow my passion always to keep a little bit of space for the hobbies and everything.

Alex: That’s interesting because all those things are away from social media. All the things that you’re interested in are not social media. Family and life is completely the opposite.

Andi: I try to do enough posting on the social media to have a presence, but I’m definitely not the guy that is going to become a super popular YouTuber or something like that, because I’d rather dedicate my time to something that I enjoy more practical, more…

Alex:  …Fulfilling for you. It has to be fulfilling.

Andi: Yeah, I try to have a balance, not ignoring the social media, but not being all the time there as well, try to find a balance.

Alex: That’s part of the album. Part of the theme of the album is balance. You have to have a balance of that in your life.

Andi: Exactly, exactly. Especially songs like Gravity exactly talk about that, talk about the losing grip to reality or struggling to find solid base. And we see that in the newer generation, maybe because the society is so confusing right now. The world is a very unstable place compared even to just 15 years ago. Nowadays, we have a lot of things that are not as normally we always thought they were. And so that destabilizing society as well, I think a little bit, when it’s too much. It’s good to have a variety, to have new things, but it’s also good to have some rules in place. The problem is that social media is so fast that it’s impossible to put rules in it because by the time you’ve made the rules, the thing doesn’t exist anymore and you are switching to something else. The speed of society, it’s a problem. The speed of society nowadays, it’s a problem, especially for younger generations, I think.

 

Alex: The world is more fragile now than it’s ever been. It’s a very fragile universe.

Andi: Very much.

Alex: But the message in the record is to rise above, man, to face your fears, to try to overcome, to hang on.

Andi: Yeah, yeah. It’s all about finding the balance, I think, because everything is possible if it’s in the right measures.

 

Alex: You have some special guests on the record. You have Randy Blythe, Ash Costello. Tell us about that.

Andi: We wanted to try to have different singers in the record because we’ve never done … We had some guests in the past, but mostly lead guitars. We had a solo on Delirium from Myles Kennedy of Alter Bridge. We had a solo from Mark from Nothing More. So we had different guests, but never a singer. So we decided to do a couple just to try, because we already have two singers in the band, so we didn’t want to put too many other voices. But Randy was a natural choice because we know him since around 2004. We’ve been friends forever, toured the world together many times. We are a big fan of Lamb of God. Randy is a big fan of Lacuna Coil, so it was a natural, like a family member.

We had to ask Randy, and we had that part on Hosting the Shadow, which was perfectly fitting him. And he also adds some personal arrangements as well, which made it even more crazy and great. And then Randy, as I say, he is a big friend, and sometimes when he finishes a European tour, he comes down to Milan and we go out dinner together with his girlfriend and go see photo exhibit together. And Ash Costello, we never met in person before the actual collaboration, but we wanted a very rock-oriented voice, not an operatic voice, not a voice that was too clean, so something more similar to Cristina’s style of singing.

And we considered two or three names, and Ash was one of the names. We asked her, and she immediately was super enthusiastic of doing it. And so she just sent back the part and it was great. And she added some arrangements on the melodies, on the harmonies of the melodies in a very American style, let’s say, that we probably wouldn’t have never thought about it because of our European flavor, let’s say. So it was great, a great addition, and we had to play the song together because we did some little touring together and at festivals like Welcome to Rockville and Sonic Temple. So it was great, a really great experience.

Alex: Well, speaking of the festivals, after the United States tour, you’re going to jump onto the festival season, right? You’ve got a bunch of festivals you’re going to be at.

Andi: Yeah, we have a few festivals here in Europe, and then probably we’re going to announce soon our full European tour. And after that we’re probably going to go Australia, Asia a little bit. But we are still planning a little bit because obviously it’s far when we still have a lot to do this year. But yes, yes, we’re definitely going to do festivals and maybe next year coming back as well to America for some more festivals.

Alex: There’s a lot of moving parts putting together a tour, as you know.

Andi: Yeah, there’s a lot of craziness on the logistics, the flight, the tour bus, the crew. And then a lot of bands are on tour as well, so you have to try to find a place to don’t collide always with some other bands. So even the schedule is hard to complete.

Alex: The record Sleepless Empire, it’s fantastic. How would you compare it to, say, Delirium?

Andi: I think musically, maybe it’s a bit more dark and there are more heavy songs with groove, with a certain speed and groove. And lyrically it’s different because it is more maybe up to speed contemporary with the status of society while Delirium it was more into the mental health problems and exploring more of that while-

Alex: More of the inner stuff rather than the outside.

Andi: Yeah, this one is more about what surrounds us nowadays.

Alex: Well, best of luck, man. Sleepless Empire coming out on Valentine’s Day. Another fantastic gift to the fans from Lacuna Coil, one of the greatest goth metal bands of all time. Man, I’m a big fan. I’ve been a big fan since the first record, man. Back in the day, I was the DJ at L’Amour from late 1981 to late 1984.

Andi: Oh, nice.

Alex: So I worked there. After my residency, I just kept hanging out there, so I was there all the time. I lived five blocks away. So seeing you guys there at my “home” place, man, that was really special to me, man. I’ll never forget that show. One of my favorite shows I’ve ever seen.

Andi: We also have a very great remembrance of that show because we had the honor to play such an iconic venue, and with Type O Negative, that was even more iconic. And then I think they closed it down after a while.

Alex: Closed in 2004.

Andi: It’s a shame, they should preserve certain places. But we had the same problem here in Milan. We had a venue called Rolling Stone that I saw there the Ramones. I saw Ozzy, Sepultura, legendary bands, and been open over 20 years from the ’70s to the ’90s. And it’s a shame they closed it down. They built a supermarket instead. They should have kept it alive.

Alex: We have some new places. We have the Paramount, where you’re going to go. There’s another place called the Kings Theater, another restored theater, Meadows, The Monarch. So there’s about six or seven metal clubs now in Brooklyn that are carrying the torch and taking metal music forward. So that’s a good thing. Everybody misses L’Amour, but there are other clubs now that are keeping it alive.

Andi: Nice. That’s great.

Alex: So we’ll see you in New York, man. Lacuna Coil. Sleepless Empire is out on Valentines Day from Century Media. Andi Ferro, thank you very much, man, for hanging out with us and spending time with us for Metal Insider. 

Andi: Thank you very much!

Sleepless Empire is available for Pre-Order here.

Track List:

01) The Siege
02) Oxygen
03) Scarecrow
04) Gravity
05) I Wish You Were Dead
06) Hosting The Shadow (feat. Randy Blythe)
07) In Nomine Patris
08) Sleepless Empire
09) Sleep Paralysis
10) In The Mean Time (feat. Ash Costello)
11) Never Dawn

 Sleepless Empire is available in the following formats:

Ltd. Deluxe CD Box Set with symbolic dice oracle
Ltd. CD Digipak
Ltd. CD Digipak (US version)
black LP & LP-Booklet
black LP & LP-Booklet (US version)
Ltd. white LP & LP-Booklet
Ltd. deep blood red LP & LP-Booklet (exclusive Sony Music Entertainment Italy version)
Ltd. Sparkle Rainbow LP & LP-Booklet
Ltd. transp. glow in the dark LP & LP-Booklet (exclusive band version)
black LP & LP-Booklet (US version)
Ltd. ultra clear LP & LP-Booklet (US version)
Ltd. silver LP & LP-Booklet (US version)
Digital album

After the release of Sleepless Empire, Lacuna Coil will not be slowing down. Shortly after the release of their new record, the Italian powerhouse will be touring through Latin America as well as Mexico in March 2025. They also recently announced that they will be joining Machine Head on their massive tour across North America in April and May 2025, alongside In Flames and Unearth. Additionally, the band has already announced some festivals in Europe during the summer. See below for all dates!

Tour Dates

03/12 Buenos Aires, AR @ El Teatro Flores
03/13 Santiago, CL @ Teatro Coliseo
03/15 Sao Paulo, BR @ Carioca Club
03/16 Curitiba, BR @ Tork N Roll
03/18 Belo Horizonte, BR @ Mr Rock
03/19 Brasilia, BR @ Toihna
03/21 Bogota, CO @ Lourdes Musical Hall
03/23 Tegucigalpa, HN @ Radio House Casa Campo
03/27 Guadalajara, MX @ C3 Stage
03/28 Monterrey, MX @ Café Iguana
03/29 Mexico City, MX @ Pabellon Oeste
03/30 San Luis Potosi, MX @ Cineteca Alameda

Machine Head Tour Dates
w/ In Flames, Lacuna Coil, Unearth

04/05 Oakland, CA @ Fox Theater
04/07 Phoenix, AZ @ The Van Buren
04/09 San Diego, CA @ Observatory North Park
04/10 Los Angeles, CA @ The Wiltern
04/12 Las Vegas, NV @ House of Blues
04/13 Salt Lake City, UT @ Union
04/15 Denver, CO @ The Fillmore Auditorium
04/17 San Antonio, TX @ The Aztec
04/18 Houston, TX @ House Of Blues
04/19 Dallas, TX @ House Of Blues
04/21 Raleigh, NC @ The Ritz
04/22 Silver Spring, MD @ The Fillmore
04/23 Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Paramount
04/25 Reading, PA @ Santander Arena
04/26 Boston, MA @ House Of Blues
04/27 Montreal, QC @ M’Telus
04/28 Toronto, ON @ History
04/30 Cincinnati, OH @ Andrew J. Brady Music Center
05/02 Detroit, MI @ The Fillmore
05/03 Chicago, IL @ Radius
05/04 Minneapolis, MN @ The Fillmore
05/05 Winnipeg, MB @ Burton Cummings
05/07 Calgary, AB @ Grey Eagle Event Center
05/08 Edmonton, AB @ Midway Music Hall
05/10 Kelowna, BC @ Prospera Place

Lacuna Coil Live

06/06 Czech Republic @ Metal Fest OpenAir
06/15 Lignano Sabbiadoro, IT @ Arena Alpe Adria
06/28 Tallinn, EE @ Tallinn Rock Festival
07/06 Lucca, IT @ Lucca Summer Festival
08/08 England, UK @ Bloodstock Festival
08/10 Germany, DE @ M’era Luna Festival
08/15 Carhaix, FR @ Motocultor

Lacuna Coil is:

Christina Scabbia: Vocals
Andrea Ferro: Vocals
Marco Coti Zelati: Bass guitars, synths
Richard Meiz: Drums

 To listen to an audio version of this interview with tracks from the LP, log on to slaughterhouseradio.com

Written by DJ Alex Kayne for Metal Insider.net