Lacuna Coil Paint Their ‘Sleepless Empire’: ‘It’s An Observation Of Our Reality’

This week, Italian goth metal icons Lacuna Coil are returning to Australia for a long-awaited headline tour—their first in a decade.

The band have been to Australia since then – in 2022, they performed at Good Things Festival in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane, as well as opened for Gojira for some hot-ticket sideshows. But their own headline shows Down Under? That’s been a long time coming.

“We’re very excited because we don’t get to come that often to Australia, so it’s very special every time,” Lacuna Coil co-vocalist Andrea Ferro tells The Music. “And we have a new album that we just released last year, so we can’t wait to play the new songs for the people and to see our friends that we haven’t seen in a long time.

“So, it’s always exciting and also special, because it’s not typical. We tour mostly in Europe or the US, and so when we come to that part of the world, it’s a bit more special, a bit more curious.”

Lacuna Coil are touring in support of their tenth album, Sleepless Empire, released last February. It’s the follow-up to their 2019 record, Black Anima, and showcases the band’s return to a heavier, more experimental musical direction.

It’s not just Ferro’s screams that sound visceral, but the breakdowns, down-tuned guitars, and menacing synthesisers, effortlessly interplaying between Ferro and Cristina Scabbia’s now-iconic vocal gymnastics. Then, there are guest vocalists: Lamb of God’s Randy Blythe and New Years Day’s Ash Costello.

Blythe features on the melodic, mosh-ready Hosting The Shadow. Upon the track’s release in August 2024, the Lamb Of God frontman detailed his 20-year relationship with the Italian band, describing them as family. Did the song come together with Randy in mind, or was it written already?

“The song was written more or less, but we knew that we wanted him on the record,” Ferro shares. “When we talked with the label, and we said, ‘Maybe we can try to get a couple of guest vocalists,’ because we never had in the past—we only had guests on guitar—we said, ‘Randy has to be there.’”

Ferro says the band have a “great relationship” with Blythe. Lacuna Coil and Blythe first met at the 2004 edition of OzzFest in the US and have remained friends ever since. “He comes to Milan and hangs out with us, and we see each other on days off the tour when we are close.

“We’ve been all over the world together. We’ve been in Australia on festival tours. We’ve been in South America. We’ve been in the States. So, we have a friendship with him and the rest of the guys. He was the guy we wanted to have for sure, 100%. Randy had to be on the record.

“That song fits his vocal style, although it’s a bit more melodic than what he normally does,” Ferro chuckles. “He did a great job. He did it in one day, basically recorded everything at home, and just sent it to us the next day. And everything went super smooth, easy, no problem.

“Also, for the video, we did a live video with him at the Aftershock Festival in California, and it was super easy. It’s just family for us. It was the natural choice.”

The band started working on Sleepless Empire in 2022, after completing Comalies XX, a reimagined version of their 2002 breakthrough album, Comalies. Sleepless Empire marks an evolution of the group’s core sound, while the past directly informed where album #10 would go—revisiting Comalies influencing their creative direction.

“It’s always a big challenge to make a record, especially after you’ve already released many,” Ferro muses. “It’s always curious for us to see what we’re going to come up with, which direction we’re going to take the band.

“We’re still very curious people, so we still listen to newer bands, newer sounds, and get inspired by heart, by everything around us. We’re always looking for something fresh, you know?”

When Lacuna Coil make an album, it’s essential that new songs have their own trademark, while also incorporating fresh elements to avoid feeling like a retread of previous material. And this is a challenge that becomes more difficult over time—the band don’t want to release records if they don’t have anything new to say.

So, going back in time and reliving memories surrounding Comalies offered the band fresh inspiration, while also helping them get through the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Instead of having to do a complete new record, we were feeling quite blank, quite empty of inspiration after the pandemic, because we’d been home just like everybody else, you know, playing video games, watching TV shows, making pizzas, so it wasn’t exactly an exciting time,” Ferro admits, sharing that the band often collect inspiration while touring, travelling, meeting new people, and discovering new bands. “And we missed that because of the pandemic.”

Rather than force another album, Lacuna Coil focused on Comalies’ 20th anniversary. “We didn’t know what to expect. For us, it was a tribute to the original and see how the new line-up would play those songs in a different style,” Ferro says.

The band currently comprises vocalists Cristina Scabbia and Ferro, bassist, keyboardist and guitarist Marco Coti Zelati, drummer Richard Meiz, and guitarist Daniele Salomone. Salomone is the latest addition to the band and visits Australia for the first time this week.

The result of Comalies XX with a new line-up? “It was interesting: a lot of people loved it; some people hated it. Like every time you touch something, which is a sort of holy grail of the band, there’s always mixed opinion,” Ferro says.

“But most people actually enjoyed it, and I think we did quite a good job on most of the songs,” Ferro continues. “And that helped us a lot going to the next record, because we kind of went back to the atmosphere of Comalies. We brought some of those atmospheres into the new work, you know, and that’s why it came out pretty dark as well.”

Working on new music following Covid-19 delays and revisiting Comalies wasn’t a simple task for Lacuna Coil, but especially more so for multi-instrumentalist Marco Coti Zelati, who composes the band’s music and, since 2016’s Delirium, has produced their albums.

“It wasn’t easy,” Ferro tells. “We had to help him, give him inspiration, an idea, find some concept, some rough concept of songs, ideas to put him in the direction of writing. But in the end, it worked. It took a long time, but it worked. And so, we felt we were ready to do it again. We were very happy with the result in the end.”

Sleepless Empire turned out to be a richly layered, dynamic gothic metal record. Thematically, the band explores the lives we live today: digital life, the 24-hour news cycle, hyper-awareness of events around the world, technological developments, and phone addiction.

“The title came from an observation of our reality,” Ferro begins. “It’s something that we are also involved in. It’s not that we are not doing this, you know, this overexposure on social media, this over-staying, always in front of the screen—it’s either the phone, it’s a laptop or TV. We’re always on, 24/7. Always online, always checking what’s going on, and it’s too much.

“And that’s why we call it the Sleepless Empire, an empire, because we have all this technology available, all this power,” he adds, “But we use it very often for very stupid things or very shallow things.”

So, Sleepless Empire was born out of observation of how much the band—and humanity as a whole—have been involved in digitalising our lives. And being a little older, Lacuna Coil keenly look back on the “before” times of mostly analogue technology. They’ve seen the shift, and Ferro believes they’re at a “lucky point” of observation where they remember the differences.

“We can still realise our life was before, while the newer generation grew up with an iPad in their hands or something like that, or a PlayStation.

“And so it was natural for us to observe these changes and how much we were kind of imprisoned in this, because it’s something very useful, very rich, very beautiful in a way, but also kind of entrapping you into a sphere, where you don’t get distant from reality very often, and we should have a better balance between the two,” Ferro explains.

And he doesn’t have love for the methods of social media algorithms that encourage only showing the “good” parts of life online.

“They never show the weakest points of life, and that’s kind of leading [the younger generation] into a wrong vision of life, which is not real,” Ferro adds. “The perfection that is always shown, the beautiful life, the money, the cars, the beautiful places, the beautiful food, it’s not always real.

“[We need] more reality checks, you know, because life is not only being cool, being well-dressed, only cool experiences. Life sometimes is boring, sometimes it’s hard, sometimes you hate it, and that’s the beauty of life; the fact that you have to go through all the phases, you’re not always happy, you’re not always sad, you’re not always negative, you know, you need both in your life, and that’s something that’s not that clear anymore.”

Lacuna Coil will perform new songs on their Sleepless Empire tour of Australia this week, but fans should also expect the classics.

“We can’t wait to play,” Ferro shares. “And so far, the other places we’ve been touring, the new songs go down really well in the set. We can also bring some classic Lacuna Coil songs or some older, different songs from the past, but there’s going to be a good chunk of the new songs as well, obviously.”

Across their past visits to Australia, Lacuna Coil have amassed plenty of memories—from seeing koalas, kangaroos, and wombats, to taking in the country’s incredible landscape, to the festivals and tours—so, Ferro has fond recollections of the band’s time Down Under.

“We had some great experiences at the festivals,” he recalls. “I remember on the Soundwave, we went to an end of the tour party in a pub, and it was me and Randy from Lamb of God. We had some drinks in the hotel a long time ago, and he carried me on his shoulders to the pub. And then, the singer of Alice In Chains [William DuVall] was there, and on the dancefloor was Master of Puppets by Metallica. So, we had a great party.

“Last time we came, there were our friends in Jinjer, so we partied with them backstage. At one of the stops, there was a guy with snakes, so you got the snakes, and with [Jinjer vocalist] Tatiana [Shmayluk], we’re playing with the snakes! It’s always a great time in Australia.”

Lacuna Coil bring their Sleepless Empire tour to Australia this week. Tickets are available here.

Destroy All Lines Presents

LACUNA COIL

SLEEPLESS EMPIRE AUSTRALIAN TOUR DATES 2026:

THURSDAY 12 FEBRUARY – THE TIVOLI, BRISBANE

SATURDAY 14 FEBRUARY – LIBERTY HALL, SYDNEY

SUNDAY 15 FEBRUARY – NORTHCOTE THEATRE, MELBOURNE

TUESDAY 17 FEBRUARY – THE GOV, ADELAIDE

THURSDAY 19 FEBRUARY – MAGNET HOUSE, PERTH