Black Anima

Black Anima came three years after Delirium. Cristina Scabbia has said the band started with too many ideas and no single focus, and that Marco Coti Zelati, the bassist who produced the record and writes most of the music, could not write because inspiration would not come. The band met with pictures and other visual material, and once they knew what they wanted to say the songs came quickly. Coti Zelati, who takes his cues from films and video games, writes as if scoring the images in his head; Scabbia and Andrea Ferro wrote the vocal lines and lyrics, and he set music to them and sent the songs back. The album was recorded at BRX Studio in Milan and mixed by Marco Barusso, with Diego Cavallotti on guitar and Richard Meiz on drums. Ferro has said the strongest thing to happen to the band in those three years was losing several people close to them, and that still feeling those people around them led to a theme about the link between this world and another. He was also reading The Physics of Angels, in which a priest and a scientist examine angels and spirits; together these produced the idea of black souls seen on the cover, along with tarot decks for speaking to the spirits and stage clothes imagined as soul hunters. Scabbia has said it is not a concept album but still a story, best heard from start to finish. It opens with "Anima Nera (Prologue)" and closes with the title track, "Black Anima (Epilogue)". Century Media Records released Black Anima on 11 October 2019. "Layers of Time" came out first, in July, then "Reckless" in September and "Save Me" in October; Roberto Cinardi directed the videos for the first two. The deluxe edition came with a custom card deck made with the artist Micah Ulrich. The album reached No. 87 on the Billboard 200 and No. 4 on Hard Rock Albums in the United States, and No. 45 on the Official Albums Chart and No. 2 on the Rock & Metal Albums Chart in Britain. A Japanese edition with four extra songs followed on 18 March 2020.