In a new interview with Jorge Botas of Portugal’s Metal Global, LACUNA COIL vocalist Andrea Ferro spoke about the financial and emotional challenges facing musicians today, particularly as it relates to touring in a post-pandemic world. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): ”We still love the lifestyle, because if you don’t love the lifestyle, you can’t do this job. Because this is the level we play. We make a good living with our music, but we’re not becoming rich; we’re not millionaires or anything like that. It’s not the ’80s anymore. And so if you do wanna do this, you really need to love what you do. Otherwise you would do another job. It is not possible to do this job if you don’t really love the lifestyle, the traveling, the meeting people every night and playing for them. So me, Marco [Coti Zelati, bass] and Cristina [Scabbia, vocals], we still have this passion, just like it was 20 or 25 years ago, and we still love to do this. Obviously we’re not getting any younger, so we kind of try to have a schedule which is doable, like three shows, a day off, three shows, a day off, so we can enjoy and we don’t have to overstress our bodies and getting tired. Although, for example, the first tour we’ve done for [the latest LACUNA COIL] album [2025’s ‘Sleepless Empire’], we’ve done 85 days with, like, 16 flights in South America, and then two months in North America on the bus with MACHINE HEAD and IN FLAMES, and then another week of headlining shows. So it’s been intense anyway, but sometimes you can do nothing about it. But in general, we try to have a more comfortable approach so that we don’t get too tired or burned out. But overall, we love the lifestyle. We love writing music, we love exchanging experiences with the people, staying on the road with our crew. It’s still a big thing for us, it’s still something that we love to do, and I don’t see us stopping anytime soon. We’re not a band that thinks about 20 years from now but I’m sure we are gonna keep going for a while, [for as long as] we can physically [do it].”
Ferro also discussed LACUNA COIL‘s musical evolution over the years and the importance of incorporating new sounds and influences on every album. He said: “I think it just depends from band to band. There’s some bands, like AC/DC, which don’t need to change — they’re doing what they do and they have done it for the entire career and it works great for them and that’s what people expect from them — and there’s other bands that are more developing their style, and we are one of those bands that we always kind of shift a little bit. Not massively, obviously — I think you can recognize the band — but we like to get different influences and to bring our music somewhere else. And I think people recognize this, recognize the fact that we’re not settling down and saying, ‘Okay, we’ve got some fans and we can keep doing the same record over and over.’ It’s not what we are as people. We’re people that are constantly growing and incorporating different influences, and we are the same as musicians. And if we release an album in 2025, I wanted it to make sense in 2025. And it doesn’t have to be modern at every cost, but it has to be contemporary, it has to have a feel that is not something that you could have done in the ’70s. And I feel like we want our band to be meaningful also now, not just ’cause we’ve done a good record 20 years ago and we still live out of the popularity of that record. And we have a lot of fans that discovered the band recently, on ‘Delirium’ [2016]. Obviously, the biggest growing for the band has been with ‘Comalies’ [2002] and ‘Karmacode’ [2006], but then every album we’ve brought in some new fans as well from different generations. And when we go to our shows, we see people our age, people much younger than us, people older than us. There’s quite a variety of male, female, older, younger, and it’s great. We love the fact that we are a band that can [appeal] to a lot of different people.”
“Sleepless Empire” came out in February 2025 via Century Media Records. Inspiration to create the LP came during the sessions for “Comalies XX” (2022),the acclaimed remake of LACUNA COIL‘s breakthrough third record “Comalies”. Writing and recording took place in northern Italy between Milano (the band’s hometown) and Como, where SPVN Studios are located. As with their previous albums, production was done in house with Marco “Maki” Coti Zelati at the helm, and artwork was hand curated by the talented Italian artist Roberto Toderico. Two other very special talents enrich the album, namely the guest vocalists: LAMB OF GOD‘s Randy Blythe on the song “Hosting The Shadow” and NEW YEARS DAY‘s Ash Costello on “In The Mean Time”.
In October 2024, Italian guitarist/producer Daniele Salomone confirmed that he had joined LACUNA COIL as the replacement for the band’s longtime guitarist Diego Cavallotti.
Salomone made his live debut with LACUNA COIL on August 4, 2024 at the Rockstadt Extreme Fest in Râșnov, Romania.
In June 2024, LACUNA COIL announced Cavallotti‘s departure. Diego, who joined LACUNA COIL in 2016, initially as a fill-in guitarist following the exit of Marco “Maus” Biazzi, later said in a social media post that “this decision is not the result of my dissatisfaction or desire to explore new opportunities.”
Cavallotti and Salomone played together in the Italian metal band INVERNO, which released its debut album, “Stasis”, in December 2023.