Gothic metal doesn’t get much more epic than Lacuna Coil, and the Italian five-piece bring their 8th studio album Delirium to Amplifier Bar on Wednesday, 12th October. SHANE PINNEGAR spoke to co-lead singer Andrea Ferro at his home in Milan, where the band are warming up for their first Australian headlining shows with a run of gigs through Europe.
“Yeah, finally we’re coming for a headline tour. It’s the first time we’re coming to headline, so we’re very excited to see the people that we haven’t seen in many years, and new people that just find out about us with the last record, so it’s going to be fun. We’re bringing a lot of traditional Lacuna Coil songs as well as some of the new songs, so it’s going to be a great party.”
Delirium is a particularly heavy and very intense record. Ferro explains that it was an emotional task to write and create the album.
“Yeah, I think we were in a kind of a different mind frame, in a different mood when we were writing the album,” he says thoughtfully, “and what we have done differently has been just following the music without trying to bring it back to our own cliché. We tried to just [not] care too much to make it what people expect from Lacuna Coil.
“We would like to surprise with this record, to have people wondering if it was really us, if it was something different. There is a new vibe – there is a new line-up for this record, and there’s definitely a lot of personal life from the last couple of years. I think unconsciously we really have just followed the music without thinking about it, without trying to have a single, or trying to have something that compromised the song, making it mellower just because people is expecting that from Lacuna Coil.”
Ferro says that the new songs are sounding great live so far, and they’re looking forward to playing more of Delirium in Australia.
“So far we only played three songs that are the first three that we released, and they’re doing really well. Actually, some people is complaining because we haven’t played more than three so far, but we want to really keep the rest of the songs for the fall when we’re going to come to Japan and Australia and start a proper album tour [for Delirium].”
Guitarists Marco ‘Maus’ Biazzi and Cristiano Migliore shared six-string duties for the band for over fourteen years until Migliore departed in early 2014, followed by Biazzi at the end of 2015. Commenting on Maus’s departure, Ferro says that although it was an amicable split, it was sad to see him go.
“Yeah, obviously every change after so much time is always a bit destabilising, it’s always difficult when you have such a big change in the line-up of the band because you’ve been together for many years, and it could [also] be destabilising on a personal level. Musically it didn’t change much because Marco [Coti Zelati] – the bass player – he’s the main songwriter, and me and Christina [Scabbia – co-lead singer], we’re always responsible for the vocal lines and the lyrics, so on that side it didn’t really change much, but obviously something… it’s different.
“A different person playing guitar, a different personality when you’re on tour…” continues Ferro, “… it is different, but we’re really determined to keep pushing the project, and if you look back, me, Marco & Christina, we are the ones that started everything in ’96, so we’re the only, basically, survivors, let’s say – musical survivors since the very beginning of the band.
“We want to keep pushing our idea of sound. Obviously there has been some time to adapt. It’s been also weird to record the album just the three of us and Ryan [Folden – drummer since 2012], so it was the first time we were so few people in the studio. It’s different. It’s sort of a new chapter for us – almost a new book we’re writing with this new line-up, but definitely we want to keep bringing the sound and the ideas that has always been behind our group.”
Lacuna Coil famously pioneered the Gothic metal sound. Ferro says their initial influences were pretty diverse.
“When we started, obviously we wanted to sound like our favourite bands, and at the time the band that really drove us towards this kind of sound were bands like Paradise Lost, Type O Negative, Tiamat. Those bands drove us towards the more darker side of metal, and so we decided to have a kind of dark atmosphere in our music because we were really loving those bands.
“In general we still love the vibe of the dark side. We still like the atmosphere, especially in the atmospheric song, to make that melancholy, and have that kind of vibe. I think it will always be part of our sound,” Ferro concludes, “because that’s the place where we’re coming from, and we don’t think that Gothic is only when you have a slow song. It’s a lot about the atmosphere of the song.”
