Dark Adrenaline

For the follow-up to Shallow Life the band went back to Don Gilmore. Andrea Ferro said their experiments on the previous album had taught them what the core of their sound was, and he valued having Gilmore come in, after months of living with the songs, to give an honest opinion of them. The album was recorded in 2011 at Officine Meccaniche in Milan and Can-Am Studio in Los Angeles and mixed by Marco Barusso at Aisha Studio in Milan, and apart from the cover the songs are credited to the six members and Gilmore. Century Media had first announced it for October 2011, then moved it to early 2012. Cristina Scabbia called the result heavier and darker, the side of the band they had found they enjoyed most on stage. The closing "My Spirit" was written on the night Peter Steele of Type O Negative died; Scabbia has said the band were great fans and had toured with them. The tenth track is a cover of R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion". "Trip the Darkness" came out digitally as the first single in October 2011, and a performance video directed by Sitcom Soldiers followed in December, while a tour of Italy and the United Kingdom under the name Darkness Rising was booked from late October. Scabbia and Ferro sang, Marco Coti Zelati played bass and keyboards, Cristiano Migliore and Marco Biazzi guitars and Cristiano Mozzati drums, with Mario Riso adding percussion. The label gave 23 January 2012 as the European release date and the 24th for North America. The album sold around 20,000 copies in its first American week and entered the Billboard 200 at number 15, the band's highest position on that chart. It reached 18 in Italy, 34 in Finland, 36 in Germany and 48 in the United Kingdom, where it was number 4 on the rock and metal albums chart. Besides the standard CD and vinyl it came as a deluxe digipak with a bonus DVD and extras, as an iTunes LP with five bonus tracks and video, and as a Metal Club edition limited to 3,000 copies. The band went on to tour with Megadeth, Motörhead, Volbeat and Sevendust.