LACUNA COIL TRIVIA
Trivia
Lacuna Coil did not start out under that name. The timeline the band published on their website in 2001 says that in May 1996 they recorded a two-song demo as Ethereal and sent it to labels around Europe. Century Media signed them, but a band in Greece already owned the name Ethereal, so they became Lacuna Coil. Their self-titled debut EP was recorded in October 1997 at Woodhouse Studio in Hagen, Germany, produced by Waldemar Sorychta.
Lacuna Coil's first ever live shows came in December 1997, supporting their labelmates Moonspell across Europe, and the band's own timeline is frank that it did not go smoothly: anxiety, stage fright and raw emotion split the band in the middle of the tour. A player from Kreator stepped in on drums and one from Tiamat on guitar to get them through. Guitarist Cristiano Migliore and drummer Cristiano Mozzati joined in January 1998, and in February the band opened for Moonspell at the Coliseum in Lisbon in front of 4,000 people, the biggest crowd they had yet faced. That August, Wacken Open Air became their first festival, and they opened it on the main stage.
In May 1999 Lacuna Coil toured on the Into the Darkness package with My Insanity, Grip Inc. and Samael, then carried on as Grip Inc.'s support act through eastern Europe, a run their timeline treasures for the chance to play alongside their friend and producer Waldemar Sorychta and their idol Dave Lombardo. On the way they made their debut at Dynamo Open Air, where almost 20,000 people packed the tent and fans at the front hoisted the Italian flag. In June they were home for Gods of Metal, sharing the bill with Metallica and Monster Magnet in front of more than 25,000 people.
The Halflife EP was made in January 2000 at Damage Inc. Studios in Ventimiglia on the Ligurian coast, with Waldemar Sorychta once more. Its five tracks were a set of firsts: the band's first try at digital techniques, their first Italian lyrics and their first cover. It came out in March 2000. One of its songs, "Senzafine", returned on Unleashed Memories, recorded that October at Woodhouse Studio, where a different version of it sits beside nine new songs.
Lacuna Coil's highest placing on the Billboard 200 is No. 15, reached by Dark Adrenaline on the chart dated 11 February 2012, just ahead of Shallow Life's No. 16 in 2009. Their longest stay belongs to Karmacode, which entered at No. 28 on 22 April 2006 after selling just under 34,000 copies in its first American week, and spent nine weeks on the chart. Broken Crown Halo later reached No. 27, Delirium No. 33 and Black Anima No. 87.
Sleepless Empire has two guest singers. Of Lamb of God's Randy Blythe, heard on "Hosting the Shadow", Andrea Ferro says their friendship began when both bands played the same Ozzfest stage in 2004 and grew over countless tours and festivals, until he became part of the family; working with him felt natural and, for a band who are fans as well as friends, a real honour. For "In The Mean Time" they wanted a true rock voice, Ferro explains, not too clean and not symphonic but with fire in it, and they found it in Ash Costello of New Years Day.
The cover of Sleepless Empire was painted by the Neapolitan illustrator Roberto Toderico, whom Cristina Scabbia met at a comic convention; what drew her was that his work is made entirely by hand. She says she is not against technology, but disagrees when people present AI as creating something new and confuse it with art that comes from inside a person, and the hand-drawn cover reflects that. The limited deluxe CD box adds an oracle game that the band hid in the booklet for fans to find; Century Media's listing describes it as a symbolic dice oracle.
Comalies, released in 2002, was a slow burn. In July 2004 it passed 100,000 copies on SoundScan in the United States and became Century Media's biggest seller worldwide, overtaking landmark records such as Tiamat's Wildhoney and Iced Earth's Something Wicked This Way Comes. Nearly two years after its release it made its first appearance on the Billboard 200, on the chart dated 7 August 2004, peaked at No. 178 on 28 August and stayed for four weeks. By April 2006 its American sales had passed 230,000.
"Heaven's a Lie", the song that broke Lacuna Coil in America, spread from one Boston station. As Cristina Scabbia remembers it, WAAF, a station that no longer exists, started playing it, other stations followed, and on the back of the radio response MTV2 asked the band for a video; the clip they made for the US market later found its way to European screens. By the label's count in the summer of 2004, the single had reached the Top 50 of R&R's Active Rock chart and was being played by nearly 100 commercial stations, and its video had topped Fuse's viewer-voted "Oven Fresh" show, beating Britney Spears, Pink and Maroon 5.
"Swamped", the single that followed "Heaven's a Lie", had its world premiere on MTV2's Headbanger's Ball, and the band also played live and acoustic on the broadcast; according to the label in 2004, it was the first such live acoustic performance since the show had been relaunched the year before. The song was also picked for the soundtrack of the film Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Cristina Scabbia counts it as the first time one of their songs was chosen for a film, if only for the soundtrack rather than the film itself, and says sitting among big names like Slipknot meant a great deal to a fairly new Italian band. "Swamped" also turned up in the 2004 video game Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and became a downloadable track for the Rock Band series.
Lacuna Coil played Ozzfest twice. In 2004 they were on the second stage, and Cristina Scabbia said at the time she was happy to be the first Italian band on the bill; in 2006 they were upgraded to the main stage. Andrea Ferro recalls that Black Sabbath headlined in 2004 and Ozzy Osbourne, with his own band, in 2006, when the band got to watch him every night for the whole summer. He calls Osbourne "our godfather", the man who gave a band from Italy its chance to break into the North American market, and Scabbia said in 2025 that their first Ozzfest was what made them explode in the United States.
Black Sabbath headlined Ozzfest 2004, and hanging out with them in catering, Lacuna Coil became good friends with drummer Bill Ward. Andrea Ferro says Ward had a show on a college radio station in California, played their songs on it, and kept telling them so. When the band got an endorsement from Pearl Drums during the tour, Ward came over to the trailer of their bus and set up the kit with their drummer, trying out the heads and the positions with him. Ferro calls it a surreal moment: Bill Ward, right there, talking drums.
The cover of Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence" on Karmacode was Cristina Scabbia's idea; she is a big fan of the band. The aim, she says, was a version that anyone who had never heard Depeche Mode would take for a Lacuna Coil song. Depeche Mode liked it themselves and, in the part of the story she says few people know, gave the band permission to film a video for it: anyone can record a cover as long as the writers are credited, she explains, but an official video needs the original band's approval.
"Our Truth", the first single from Karmacode, was first heard on the soundtrack of the film Underworld: Evolution, where it sat alongside Puscifer, Linkin Park's Chester Bennington and Slipknot. The video was filmed in Los Angeles, up in the hills in the late evening. Cristina Scabbia remembers it as a slightly scary night, with wolves to be heard all around, endless changes and long make-up sessions, and bitter cold.
Shallow Life (2009) was meant as a send-up of superficial living. Cristina Scabbia has explained that in Milan, the fashion capital, everything in the media has to be perfect and shiny, as if you need a gleaming car to count as a winner, and that this fed the whole album. The sarcasm did not land: she remembers being told they had changed their image, sold out, turned into a pop band. It was also their first record with Don Gilmore, the first time they had worked with a different producer. The video for the lead single "Spellbound" was shot at Gold, the Dolce & Gabbana restaurant in Milan, a room covered in mirrors and gold that the band were given for free and that Scabbia felt summed up the album perfectly. Its director, Roberto Cinardi (Saku), went on to make many more of their videos.
Two Lacuna Coil songs are farewells. "My Spirit", on Dark Adrenaline, was written on the night Type O Negative's Peter Steele died; the whole band were huge fans, had toured with them, and Cristina Scabbia says the people behind the music turned out to be wonderful too. "One Cold Day", on Broken Crown Halo, is dedicated to Claudio Leo, the band's guitarist from 1995 to 1998, who died in January 2013. Andrea Ferro had known him since they were sixteen or seventeen and hanging out in the same metal bars, and says the lyrics lean on rain and the other forces of nature, treating life and death as two parts of the same game.
The departures of guitarist Cristiano Migliore and drummer Cristiano Mozzati were announced on Valentine's Day, 14 February 2014. Cristina Scabbia said the date was chosen on purpose, because underneath the decision there was still a great deal of love: no fight, no egos, no anger, and so, she joked, no angry articles on Blabbermouth. Her message signed off with "Nothing stands in our way." The band went out on The Hottest Chicks in Hard Rock Tour as a five-piece, with Marco Biazzi covering all the guitars and Ryan Blake Folden, who had drummed with them on most of the 2012 and 2013 tours, behind the kit. Within half an hour of the news, Scabbia said, 25 people had messaged her asking to audition. There would be no auditions.
Cristina Scabbia calls "Nothing Stands in Our Way", the lead single from Broken Crown Halo, the band's anthem, a song that goes on every tour; the line she holds dearest is "we fear nothing". Andrea Ferro says it was written while the news was full of Europe's collapsing economies and people losing their jobs, and recalls that when they started out in Milan no Italian rock or metal band had ever made it internationally. The band's first book, announced in August 2017, carries the same title: the twenty-year story in the members' own words, illustrated with rare photographs, offered as a Classic edition and a limited Signature set, with fans who registered early given the chance to see their names printed inside. A later, expanded paperback from the London publisher Rocket 88 carries the story on through the making of Black Anima, the pandemic and Live From The Apocalypse.
Delirium (2016) is set in a fictional sanatorium. Each song tells a different patient's story, the band wore stage outfits that suggested patients, and Cristina Scabbia visited a number of closed-down sanatoriums and mental hospitals while it was being made. The opener, "The House of Shame", grew out of the story of a real sanatorium in the United States that was said to be haunted, and is sung from the point of view of the spirit that roams its grounds. Andrea Ferro has explained that the album took its name from the title track, which repeats the word "delirium" over and over.
Bassist and main songwriter Marco Coti Zelati (Maki) shapes how Lacuna Coil look as well as how they sound. He produced Delirium, recorded at BRX Studio in Milan between December 2015 and February 2016, and built its artwork himself from an atmospheric photo session by the Italian photographer Alessandro Olgiati. The cover and lettering of the December 2016 song "Naughty Christmas" are his work too. On Sleepless Empire (2025) the production was again done in-house with him at the helm, and he plays guitars and synths as well as bass.
The videos for "Blood, Tears, Dust" and "You Love Me 'Cause I Hate You" were both directed and edited by Cosimo Alemà and produced by the company Borotalco. When the first came out in March 2017, Cristina Scabbia called it the first time the band had really acted and hinted that it was only part of something bigger. In the second, she plays one of two investigators looking into a young woman's disappearance and murder, partnered by the actor Andrew Harwood, while the rest of the band turn up in other roles. Andrea Ferro cites True Detective as a clear influence, along with a Twin Peaks and Resident Evil mood, and says the two clips should be seen almost as a single piece.
At the Metal Hammer Golden Gods on 11 June 2018, held at Indigo at The O2 in London and hosted by Hatebreed's Jamey Jasta, Lacuna Coil won the fan-voted Best Live Band award, on a night when Arch Enemy took Best International Band. Readers had backed them before: back in 2004, the readers of Metal Edge voted Lacuna Coil "the next big thing" and named Cristina Scabbia female performer of the year.
2018 marked twenty years since Lacuna Coil's debut, and on 19 January they celebrated with a one-off show at the O2 Forum Kentish Town in London. The British circus troupe Incandescence shared the stage, and the career-spanning set included songs the band had never played live before. They described the night as a birthday party, an anniversary celebration and above all a huge thank-you to everyone who had travelled with them for those twenty years. The show was filmed and recorded for The 119 Show - Live In London.
During the pandemic Lacuna Coil played their newest album to an empty hall in their home town. In September 2020 they streamed a full performance of Black Anima from the Alcatraz club in Milan with no audience; it became the live album Live From The Apocalypse, whose CD and vinyl editions came with a bonus DVD, and its live take of "Bad Things", until then a studio track available only through Amazon, went out to every digital platform. In February 2021 they joined L'Ultimo Concerto?, in which around 130 Italian acts were each filmed on the stage of a different venue, standing in silence, a year after the country's venues had first closed. Their return to a real crowd came on 7 April 2022, supporting Apocalyptica at the Masquerade in Atlanta: their first show in front of an audience in more than two years.
The title Comalies blends two words, "coma" and "lies". Cristina Scabbia has said the band went through a kind of creative explosion while recording the album, working as if in a coma, in another dimension. At first they meant to use just the word "coma", but something was missing, so they played with the two words together.
Comalies XX (2022) did not simply re-record the 2002 album: the current line-up took its songs apart and carried them into the present. Cristina Scabbia insisted it was no reboot and no spin-off, just songs born twenty years earlier dressed for 2022. The day after its release, on 15 October 2022, the band played Comalies in full at a one-night show at Fabrique in Milan. Scabbia has said they had stopped creating altogether during the pandemic and that this project brought back their love of songwriting, and the band's own biography places the real start of Sleepless Empire at the moment Comalies XX came out.
In 2018 Cristina Scabbia was a coach on the fifth Italian season of The Voice, shown in prime time on Rai2, alongside J-Ax, Al Bano and Francesco Renga, with Costantino della Gherardesca hosting. She told Rolling Stone Italia that she had not put herself forward: the offer came as a surprise, and she weighed it against the band's concerts and plans before saying yes. She expected some people to decide she had sold out, but fellow musicians, some from the extreme end of metal, told her The Voice was one of their favourite shows because of how well known it is in America, and urged her to go and smash it. Once the series ended, she said, Lacuna Coil concerts were already booked.
Cristina Scabbia sings on two tracks of Look Outside Your Window, the album four members of Slipknot made on the side during the 2008 All Hope Is Gone sessions and finally released on Record Store Day, 18 April 2026. Nobody formally asked her, she says: Corey Taylor, Jim Root, Shawn Crahan and Sid Wilson were writing freely in a building across from the studio, a calm, creative bubble, and she found herself singing harmonies and recording vocals for the pure pleasure of it. On "Christina" she reads a poem by Crahan, translated into Italian because he liked the sound of the language, and on "Is Real" she sings backing vocals behind Taylor.
Cristina Scabbia, a self-described massive nerd, was thrilled when "Closer" made it into both Rock Band and Guitar Hero. In 2021 Blizzard Entertainment asked her and the guitarist and YouTuber Mark the Hammer to turn the world of Diablo II into a song for the release of Diablo II: Resurrected, and the result was "Start Again". She had her own memories of the game: it came on tour with Lacuna Coil, when their guitarist was so hooked that he carried his computer along and played it almost every day, while the others were happy just to watch. The first part of the song is built on the game's "Tristram Village" theme, and her lyrics draw on "The Initiate", a two-part poem printed in the game manuals.
Lacuna Coil were born at the Midnight, a club on Via Altaguardia in Milan, as Cristina Scabbia recalled in a 2025 interview. In October 2024 she published Il diavolo mi ha venduto l'anima with Sperling & Kupfer, tracing her road from the outskirts of Milan to stages around the world. The line at the top of the publisher's page insists it is not a biography, and the book sends a mischievous devil called Devo to distract readers as he tries to win back his master's contract. Her publisher's author note describes her as a gamer, an illustrator and a lover of Japanese culture, as well as a singer.