Life is full of surprises and unexpected turns, and often, things don’t go as planned. While speaking with Andrea Ferro, also known as Andi, I notice a framed AC Milan jersey in the background. The Lacuna Coil singer reveals at the end of the interview that during a recent—at the time—Champions League match of the Italian team, which he attended at the legendary San Siro, he won a contest for the jersey. After the game, all the players signed it for him in the locker room. But that wasn’t the only unexpected twist—when asked an “off-the-record” question, Andi mentioned that Lacuna Coil had no plans to perform in Greece in 2025, yet just a few days later, they were announced for this year’s Release Athens festival…
Rockpages.gr: What would you say that is the meaning behind the title of the album, “Sleepless Empire”?
Andi: It starts from observation on the way society is today, especially after the pandemic. We have noticed how much is, we call it “Empire”, but it’s the society that’s full of inputs and information, like Spotify, Amazon music, Apple Music, Netflix, a lot of video games, a lot of connectivity and everything available, 24/7 and people is always looking at the phone, looking at the screen, always connected, but also very disconnected from real life more and more. Coming from a generation that has been living through both the analog world and the digital era we’re living now, very often we have enough balance between the two. We’re able to separate how much time we spend on social media and how much we would like to live our real life. But, we feel that the newer generation sometimes struggle to separate these two things, and feel isolated a lot, even if we have all these information and inputs.
So, we started from that observation, and then obviously, for us, a “concept” is something that goes along the record, but it’s not a full story. It’s more like a movie where you have one common story, that it’s separated by different characters, which are the songs. Now, every song is a different input and a different inspiration and so that was the beginning. You know, we always need a title and an image to start songwriting for the record. It really needs to visualize the record before it starts working on it.
Rockpages.gr: We belong to one of the last generations of mankind, that we were born in an analog world, but later we were introduced to the digital world. So, how do you think this affects you, both in music, writing music and performing music, as well as your everyday life?
Andi: I think it’s something that it’s inside you, it’s not something that you think about it, it’s just the way you’ve been experiencing your life. Growing up with other kids, without your parents knowing where you were. You just went out and play football with your friends or something else, and you just disappeared all day, and nobody could reach you, and nobody could call you and nobody was worried about it. Everybody knew that you were up with your friends playing. It wasn’t a problem. While, today if you disappear for one hour people think you’re dead! Or something like that… Somebody killed you or kidnapped you! So, it’s a very different world we’re living. And for us, it’s not so much the problem, because, as you say, we’ve been able to experience both, and we’ve been able to learn, step by step, how to live in the digital era as well. While the kids they’re born with their cell phones or games always in a screen in front of their face, sometimes they don’t know how to interact with other humans when they’re face to face, because of these barriers of the screen. Τhat’s why I feel society nowadays seems fragile and confused.
Also, still part of the theme of “sleepless empire” is that we have kind of lost the balance as people, as human beings. Because, we don’t know how to react to certain things anymore. Also, sometimes we don’t understand how powerful the digital world is. How powerful the media are. When you write something on Instagram, it’s not only for you and your friends, it’s for the world to see. So, if you say something like you would talk with your friends, it’s not the same thing, because everybody can see, everybody can comment, everybody can judge you just for what you’ve wrote or for the picture you’ve posted. So it’s a very powerful medium without with zero regulation, zero learning. Nobody told you how to use this media. You just found it in your hand, and it’s super powerful. So it has affected the society very much. Some people think that what they see on social media is the reality. They think that everybody is beautiful, always well dressed. Everybody’s always eating the best food. They are always vacationing in the best places.
But, that’s not reality. People only show what they want to show, what they like to show what how they like to appear, which is not reality. So, when you meet these people in person, they are very different.
We’re not judging, because we are also part of this game. We’re also using the social media all the time. We also live in this society, but at least we feel we a better background to face this new reality.
Rockpages.gr: This your heaviest album so far, and I think your vocals are more brutal and heavier than even before. Did you go for that intentionally, or did it just come out like that?
Andi: I think we started a process, with the record, a few years ago, of getting heavier in the music and the voice. Especially my voice goes along with the music. If Marco writes a lot of songs with double bass and reefs and grooves, then obviously it fits better if I gonna do something heavy or something groovy, powerful, just because the music goes that way. So, we have followed the music a lot with the vocals, and in the end, with this type of direction, it fits better if I do the rhythmical heavy parts, and Cristina does the chorus, the whole big open courses. It just fits better with the style of singers that we are. Also, this way we also simplify a bit the fact that we have two different ranges of vocals.
So, when we were both singing kind of clean it was sometimes hard for one of the two, because if it fits well for Cristina, maybe it’s difficult for me, or the other way around. So, this way it’s simpler for everybody, and it fits the musical direction. That said it doesn’t mean that in the future we’re not going to use some more clean vocals again. It depends what kind of songs we’re going to write. But,l for now, I think it fits.
Rockpages.gr: So, obviously the vocal dynamics between you and Christina is the band’s. Have you even tried, even for fun, to swap and Cristina handle the brutal vocals and you the clean ones? Or no?
Andi: Yeah, we have, sometimes in the practice room, we have tried, but she’s really able to do the growl vocals, for some reason, she’s an amazing singer, but, but it’s not for her. She tried, but she’s never satisfied when she tried to do the growl screaming voice. And I think there’s no reason. I mean, she’s so good in clean vocals that is not needed for me to do that. She’s so good that it’s enough for the band, I think.
I like doing clean vocals sometimes, and if in the future, I’m not excluding songs where I’m going to use, Again, the clean order, say my clean vocals, but everybody is great at what what we do, you know? So I think it’s the best for the result is to have her doing the clean ones and I do the more powerful stuff.
Rockpages.gr: Would you say that this is your best album?
Andi: Everybody always say that it’s their best album when the new album comes out. I don’t think it’s the best. I think it’s the best album for 2025 when it comes out… it’s the best we could do. It’s the best we can do musically. But, it doesn’t mean in general. I don’t think there is a best album in general. There are albums that are more successful for the people and albums that are less successful. But, I think in general, you always try to make your best. To make an album as good as you can. But, sometimes you you reach the results… a little bit less. And there are different moments in a career of a band, different moments in their lives as people. So, there’s never a best album.
I think there are albums that are more complete or more successful than others, because it’s the right time for the band. Let’s say “Comalies” when it came out was really successful, because it was the first album where we reached a certain balance of style, which was more unique and well-written, well recorded. Also, for a lot of people it was their first approach to our band, because it was much a bigger success than some other albums before. And then other albums have been more successful or less successful, depending on the moment in our history. Maybe because we try something different, maybe because the band was changing its lineup.
Let’s say a record like “Shallow Life”, for example, has been successful, but not as much as others, because we tried go somewhere else with the music. And some people loved it. Some people didn’t like it, and then we did other records have been successful, like “Dark Adrenaline” or “Delirium”, like “Broken Crown” was the last record of the old lineup of Lacuna Coil. So, you can feel that is a record of passage between a new era and old era. And then “Delirium” is the new era, and it was really successful again, and “Black Anima” was also really successful. So it depends, you know… We always try to make the best record possible, obviously. But then it’s for different reason. It can become a huge success or a normal success.
Rockpages.gr: This time you have two special guests on this album, Ash Costello and Randy Blythe . It’s something that you’ve never done before in an album. Why did you wait for so long to have a special guest in an album of yours?
Andi: We had some guests on “Delirium”, but they were guitarists, not vocalists. We had Myles Kennedy from Alter Bridge doing a lead guitar. We had Mark from Nothing More doing lead guitar, so we had different guests, but never a singer, maybe because we are already two singers in the band, so it’s a little harder to put more singers, but we have tried. We have decided to try on this record, and we only put two, so we didn’t overdo it, because we already have a lot of vocals. And we liked the experiment. Actually, Randy is a longtime friend. We met him the first time on Ozzfest in 2004 and we became friends. We were big fans of Lamb of God. He’s a fan of Lacuna Coil, so we kind of was the natural choice to ask him to be the first person to try to be on the record, because he’s a part of the family. When he finishes a European tour, sometimes he comes down to Milan and we go to eat together. We go to see a photo exhibition, or some other things. He is a is a friend for a long, long time we have also a chat with bullshit and stupid things and Ash… We also wanted a female vocalist, but for the song, we needed somebody that was more in a style, closer to Cristina, more rocking, not so much operatic or too clean. And so we thought about two or three names, and she was one of the names, and we send her the song, and she loved it, and she immediately sent back the recordings, and she did a great job. And then we had to tour together in the States. We had the opportunity to play the song live together and live on a big festivals in America as well. So, we tried, and we like the results, but maybe in the future, we can make it even better with some somebody else, other projects
Rockpages.gr: In your career, in the past, you have, as you said, managed to reinvent Lacuna Coil sound from one album to another. if you had the chance to scrap one album and record it from the beginning, which one would that be?
Andi: The two records I feel they could have been different are probably “Shallow Life” and “Unleashed Memories”. Also that one, I think we did it quite in a rush… “Unleashed Memories”, because we didn’t have enough time for it. We weren’t so ready to go in the studio, so we kind of rush it a little bit. And the result wasn’t bad, but I think it could have been even better… And “Shallow Life”, probably of the newest ones is the one that I would say I’d like to retouch something, not my favorite, but it has some great songs, like “Spellbound” or “Wide Awake” or “Survive”. But, still, I think it could have done even better. But, the problem is that it was the first record we tried to change the producer, and we went to work with an American producer, who we really like and we went again to work with him on the “Dark Adrenaline”, as well. But, I think “Shellow Life” was the first try, and we didn’t know each other too well, so we didn’t completely gel in the right way. I think we didn’t. I think we well, we worked better together on “Dark Adrenaline” than we did on “Shallow Life”.
Rockpages.gr: You are Italians, obviously, but you sing in English. When you write lyrics, do you think of something in Italian, you write it and then translate? Or you go straight to English?
Andi: No, we’ve always gone straight to English. We started singing in English from the very beginning. So, we never even consider Italian. We did some songs where we use a little bit of Italian, or even one song since ““Senzafine””, which we did, all in Italian, but it was a very different kind of song. Especially with heavy music, Italian is very hard, because it’s a very melodic language. So, it fits if you do some more melodic songs, but we never really listened also to a lot of Italian music when we were young, and so we never even consider fully writing Italian. We started in English right away,
Rockpages.gr: Well, you can’t say that Italy is like a traditional country in heavy metal… yet! But, Lacuna Coil is the most famous heavy metal band coming out from Italy. How do you appreciate this giving inspiration to other Italian musicians, kids that want to start a band and see you as a role model.
Andi: we when we started to be known with records like “Comalies” and “Karma Code”, we received a lot of messages from younger bands that they wanted to follow our footsteps, obviously a lot of girls as well, because of Cristina singing. They also wanted to sing rock music as well and bands know now that that they can try to make a proper career, even if they’re from Italy. And there’s more bands now that they grow up faster than we did, like for example, Fleshcode Apocalypse or “Wind Rose”, or there’s some bands that are really doing a career, even more underground bands, so that there’s definitely a scene of bands that have more credibility and more possibility for a career after we’ve kind of paved the way, but obviously it’s still an underground genre for Italy, and we are the only one that they kind of made it in the mainstream a little bit on certain moments of our career. But, I see a future for metal in Italy as well. You know, there’s a lot of attention on the big bands like, when Metallica comes or Linkin Park, or something. They sell a lot of tickets. Obviously, it’s harder for Italian bands, but it’s changing. I think maybe there will be a day where even an Italian band can fill up a big place like those.
