Lacuna Coil: Surviving 30 Years Of Technological Disruption
Lacuna Coil’s Andrea Ferro discusses navigating new technological eras, their dream collaborations and why Lars Ulrich was right in his Napster battle.
Words Thomas Jackson // Image Marta Petrucci
Italian gothic metal legends Lacuna Coil are returning for their first Australian headline tour in over a decade in February. It will be the first time Australian fans will be able to hear songs from their new album, Sleepless Empire, performed live. As they’re preparing for the tour, The Note catches co-vocalist and founding member Andrea Ferro while he’s still recovering from a massive 2025. Last year saw the band spend over 200 days on tour and perform at festivals Aftershock and Bloodstock Open Air, tour on a wild four-band bill with Machine Head, In Flames and Unearth and headline their own European tour. Their 2026 begins with a tour of Australia, and Ferro is excited to finally come back for a headline tour.
“I mean, we've been back with Gojira and Good Things Festival, which was amazing,” Ferro says. “Now it's time for us to come back and play for the core of our fans in Australia. We're very excited and we have tried to put together a setlist which embraces a little bit of [Sleepless Empire] because that's what we're promoting right now, but also all the history of the band and some songs that we haven't played as much recently. It's gonna be a good set with a good chunk of songs from all different eras of Lacuna Coil… It's great to come back and still see our fans, after all these years.”
On Sleepless Empire, two songs particularly stand out, ‘Hosting the Shadow’, featuring Lamb of God vocalist Randy Blythe and ‘In The Mean Time’ featuring New Years Day vocalist, Ash Costello. It’s not often that Lacuna Coil has guest vocalists featured on their songs. When asked who would be a dream collaboration, Ferro has a name in mind that would make fans salivate at the mere idea.
“The problem is that they're always - this kind of level of people - super busy with their own thing or already made a lot of collaborations which are maybe with huge artists. Or sometimes we know they might reply to us, but the problem is that they’re not sure they're gonna do it because they have a lot of other things [to do]. We would love to have Jonathan Davis from Korn, for example, but I know JD is super busy, and probably, I don't know if he's willing to do a collaboration with us. There are some dream singers we have in our bucket list. But you also need the right song to offer to these people. It’s not automatic just because you want him that he’s going to fit in the song. Never say never. Maybe next time we will do some more collaborations and maybe we will have some bigger names or dream names in our list.”
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Sleepless Empire is a commentary on today’s society, a generation trapped in a digital world. Forming in 1994, Lacuna Coil is part of the first generation that remembers the analog world but lived through the digital era, which included the worldwide adoption of the internet. Now we’re on the cusp of a new era of artificial intelligence.
“The problem with technology is that it’s moving super fast. It’s hard to keep up and understand how far you can go. Sometimes you’re abusing technology, but you don’t even realise you’re doing it,” says Ferro.
“Every day there’s something new, something faster, something bigger. Now, AI is the topic of the moment and everybody is scared because we don't know where we're heading and we know that with the internet, there's no control over things. There's not really a way to make sure it’s going to be used in the proper way. There's no way it's going to be ever legal. Even legally, you don't even know what to do because every account needs its own legal terms and it's something worldwide, without any regulation worldwide, that's the problem. When they started the internet, there was zero regulation about the thing that was gonna go worldwide.
“So it's very hard to control anymore, and it's almost impossible to stop whatever is done illegally or not the correct way. I think that's the main problem. It's not so much the advancement of technology or all these things connected, but the problem is that there's zero regulation.
“With the young people, they don't have enough human experience to sometimes handle all the drama that comes from comments or the feedback, the bullying, all this stuff. I feel it was a little better in the early 2000s. I feel it was a great time for us and for music because you still have the internet, it was there, but it was something marginal and not as main as it is now. So mostly you have to rely on going out there and playing for the people and have the more traditional media controlling a little bit, filtering a little bit. I think rules are important. I'm not obsessed with rules. I think it's also okay to go against rules every now and then, but there must be some points that you can't surpass.”
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Ferro is no stranger to changing with the times. Lacuna Coil’s album Karmacode was released in 2006, just as the rise of music piracy and torrenting took over the industry.
“I think it was worrying in the beginning, especially, but we couldn't even imagine how it could have gone in the future. When we started, I remember we were in 2006 when we released our album Karmacode. The internet was just getting more popular. With our label, we put a file of the song ‘Our Truth’ - which was the lead single at the time - on a digital file for the pirate sites to download to see how many people were going to download. The song was fake; it was just the right title, Lacuna Coil ‘Our Truth’, but the file was just white noise. Nothing in it sound wise. It was sort of a decoy to see how many people were gonna go downloading on the illegal sites and stuff. Back then, we had three or four million downloads in a week. That kind of opened our eyes towards where it was going with the piracy, with illegal downloading and how the future was looking weird and how much Lars Ulrich [Metallica drummer] was actually correct with his Napster battle. Although I understand why people were complaining about it, but he was right. I'm not saying he did the right thing, but I'm saying the train of thought was correct. The future was looking weird for musicians, especially labels, and he was right on that. I think that opened our eyes.”
At the end of the day, Ferro believes you have to go with the flow and adapt to the situation around you to survive. Finding new ways to find income is essential, especially when physical sales are no longer as prominent as they used to be.
“I think it was a little better before, because it was easier for a band to focus only on music. Now you have to be a businessman not only for music, but you have to take care of social media, you have to take care of online shops, online sales and design merchandise constantly. Write music more often because you can’t be absent for too long because the offering is so overcrowded. We're lucky because we built our following before the internet, so we still have a solid chunk of people that no matter what, are gonna be interested in the band. But a lot of the new bands, if they don't have a moment of buzz or hype right away, it's very hard to be there for a longer time and make a career because the cost of touring has increased like everything else in life. So it's hard and it's a very different moment. I think it was better before when it was a bit more in the hands of the musicians.”
Catch Lacuna Coil performing at The Gov on Tuesday 17 February. Tickets on sale now at oztix.com.au.
