Cristina Scabbia takes us inside Lacuna Coil’s new album Sleepless Empire, and reflects on overcoming adversity, cutting out negative people, and a life lived through gothic metal.
“It turns heads, that’s for sure!”
Cristina Scabbia shakes her head and laughs. She’s talking about the video for I Wish You Were Dead, Lacuna Coil’s latest release from their brand new 10th album, Sleepless Empire. The three-minute film features dancing (“That’s a Lacuna Coil first!”), birthday cake and a glass coffin – the latter segues interestingly into the band’s previous video, for Gravity.
“I Wish You Were Dead is about trying to get negative people out of your mind,” she continues. “We all have that person we wish had never entered our lives. It could be a relationship that got in a bad way, it could be someone in our workplace, or it could even be someone in our family. It could simply be one of those fleeting moments of anger in which you just wish you could delete your thoughts and go on with life without that negativity.
“I love the contrast that exists in the song. It’s danceable in a way but at the same time it has strong emotion in the lyrics.”
Sleepless Empire has strong emotions aplenty. In fact, this is one of the constants in the career of a band that skilfully weave goth rock shadows into blistering bursts of alt. metal. After a lengthy pandemic-related delay in writing new material, Lacuna Coil’s sting has simply got sharper. Not only does it mark a new high in the smoothly choreographed vocal transitions between Andrea Ferro’s harsh, turbulent roar and Cristina’s svelte, mirror-clean melodics, but it’s also one of those albums you need to listen to start to finish. It focuses on feeling overwhelmed in a modern world where everything is online and impersonal, and – rather like a story – the album rises and falls in a way that will keep fans gripped.
“The Sleepless Empire is the world we’re living in right now: a very hectic world in which we always have to be awake and producing,” Cristina affirms. “We’re expected to be in touch with the rest of the world all the time, but at the same time we are more disconnected than ever, because everything is done online or remotely.”
The result, she feels, is that many young people can feel awkward about meeting people because they have become so used to distance. “In person, they don’t have that comfort zone, so dealing with someone in real life makes them feel weird.
“Those of us that are a bit older saw it all go from analogue to digital – there are both good and bad things involved in both worlds. I am not saying all social media is bad. I understand what younger generations are doing because many of them are my friends; I know their language, I understand their lives. They have been born with this technology, so they have not experienced how things were before.”
In her perfect world, there would be more balance. Cristina, a keen gamer, is certainly no technophobe and Lacuna Coil have increasingly used technology to help perfect their music – there’s a notable use of electronics in Sleepless Empire, but it’s used as background pastels to the content’s guitar-led, dark-hued splashes of angst and fear.
“There are things I miss from the past because there was less scrutiny on people’s opinions and on your every movement,” she considers. “Music, for example, has become easier to find and access, but there is also less passion towards it because it’s taken for granted. I wish people would attach more importance to the music they listen to; some people don’t even realise they are constantly listening to music. Sometimes you don’t pay attention to it, you forget that someone has created that.”
Most people reading this, or listening to Sleepless Empire, will realise that music is a whole lot more significant than background noise. Music is therapy, and for Lacuna Coil it always has been.
The band’s last album of original material, 2019’s Black Anima, was written in the context of bereavement and relationship breakdown. In 2025 they’re talking about the challenges of finding yourself and living true to your beliefs despite a barrage of suffocating expectation and not always positive influence.
“I heal through music,” she nods. “In times that are particularly sad in my life, music is therapy. I find it interesting that every time I am sad, I listen to even sadder music. I listen to music that really crushes my soul. It allows me to push out negative feelings and let out the tension; it is somehow comforting. Others might prefer happier music, but we all have our own ways of finding that therapy.”
That disparity in how music might affect an individual is one of the reasons Lacuna Coil aren’t always comfortable talking about the specific meaning of songs, or of certain lines. They want fans to interpret things for themselves, and derive what power, or release, comes from them in their own, personal way.
Cristina smiles. “That’s the beauty of music. No matter what words the artist used, you find your own way of interpreting them. People approach us and ask about the meanings of certain songs – sometimes just a particular phrase or a few notes. You can’t always explain methodically or mathematically why it happened or where it came from, but the important thing is that the connection exists, it has reached somebody and they have identified with it.
“On this album we purposefully leave things open sometimes, because we want people to have that connection. In Gravity for example, the concept of gravity can be something pleasant but taken a different way it can mean falling, being out of control of what you’re doing.”
If Black Anima was written in troubled times, nothing could have prepared Cristina for what was to come, just months after its release. Italy was among the first European countries to be plunged into lockdown in 2020 – it was hit harder and for longer than most. Like all artists, Lacuna Coil were utterly derailed, tours for the album cancelled along with every other plan. Also, being a set of colleagues that need to be in the same room to write and create, the normally productive outfit found itself effectively trapped, redundant.
“We can’t write remotely, we have to be together,” she jabs. “We have to be at home and meet every day. During the pandemic we couldn’t do any of that, and because we were all just stuck where we were, doing nothing, we had not been able to collect even the experiences we would need to write a new record.”
With the world eventually emerging from enforced slumber, Lacuna Coil found themselves out of time with Black Anima, and with nothing else to record. They hit upon a novel idea – to re-work their breakthrough album, 2002’s Comalies, applying modern production techniques and new perspectives. The result, released in 2022 as Comalies XX, turned out to be the branch that stoked the fire.
“We re-wrote a record that was so pivotal for our career, but at the same time we were noticing and loving the fact that our usual process was finally back. This brought back many elements from the past – we didn’t do it on purpose, but I think you can hear certain elements of our past within Sleepless Empire. That’s another beautiful thing about music; things stay there in the corner of your mind.”
Those glimpses of the past, echoes from things we may not clearly remember but have nevertheless affected us, are as evident in Lacuna Coil’s new music as they are in anyone’s life. For the Italians, the reality is that they have been a band for over a quarter of a century. It’s a fact that Cristina finds hard to process.
She grins, stoically. “I don’t believe it. It feels like we only started a couple of years ago. I am not someone who chooses to focus on the past, but all the same, to know we’ve been going that long is the weirdest feeling. I always liken each Lacuna Coil album to a photograph, capturing the place we were at during that time, and most importantly with Sleepless Empire, the present. I love progress and evolution – looking back there are things we are very happy about but also things that we missed at the time – but I really want to focus my energy on the present and the future, and I just find it so surreal to think that Lacuna Coil has been going so long.”
More than anything, those 25-plus years of creating, touring, setbacks and comebacks, have allowed her to accumulate a wealth of experiences, both as an artist and a human being. It’s also enabled her to develop enviably solid and enduring friendships with Andrea and Marco (Coti Zelati, bassist and producer), who were in the band from the start, and with drummer Richard Meiz, who has played with them since 2019.
“Those friendships are priceless because when I go on tour, it’s as if I am on tour with my second family,” she reflects. “It’s been a long time, even though it may not feel like it, and we have grown together in that time.
"It’s a privilege, frankly.”
Sleepless Empire is out now via Century Media. Lacuna Coil play Bloodstock on August 8 and tour the UK in November.
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