Italian goth metal icons Lacuna Coil have announced that their tenth studio album will be coming early next year. Titled Sleepless Empire, the album arrives on February 14 and comes steeped in conceptually dense themes of paranoia over technology and the existential crisis that the digital age has wrought upon us all. Happy Valentine's Day!
“Sleepless Empire captures, through our eyes, the chaos of a generation trapped in a digital world that never stops, where social media consumes identity and every day pushes us one step closer to becoming soulless zombies," the band explain. "We find ourselves in between, having witnessed a full analogic world and the modern one, confronting the evolution and searching for a true meaning of it all. Throughout every song, the journey is an undercurrent of rebellion, a desperate cry to reclaim oneself in an era that seems to have lost its sense of time and reality.”
The announcement comes paired with Lacuna Coil's new single, Oxygen, complete with an impressive video that sees frontwoman Cristina Scabbia quite literally submerging herself in the themes of the song.
“Oxygen is a powerful exploration of emotional struggle and inner conflict," she reveals. "The lyrics convey a sense of drowning in a toxic environment, both literally (in the video) and metaphorically, where attempts at salvation, represented by “oxygen” are somehow futile. This song encapsulates the feeling of struggling to break free from what holds us down, when the journey is filled with difficulty. It’s a raw anthem of vulnerability, resilience, and the courage to face what seems insurmountable.
"Having to stay in the water for so many hours during the video shoot was cathartic for me," she adds, "the realisation that the pleasant sensation of floating could in an instant become dangerous and deadly if I wasn’t careful was very fitting with the song’s theme.”
Watch the video below. Lacuna Coil hit the UK and Ireland for a host of dates later this month.
Lacuna Coil Sleepless Empire tracklist
1. The Siege
2. Oxygen
3. Scarecrow
4. Gravity
5. I Wish You Were Dead
6. Hosting The Shadow (feat. Randy Blythe)
7. In Nomine Patris
8. Sleepless Empire
9. Sleep Paralysis
10. In The Mean Time (feat. Ash Costello)
11. Never Dawn
Lacuna Coil UK and Ireland tour dates 2024
Oct 15: Limelight, Belfast
Oct 16: Academy, Dublin
Oct 18: O2 Academy, Bournemouth
Oct 20: Academy, Manchester
Oct 21: SWG3, Glasgow
Oct 22: KK’s Steelmill, Wolverhampton
Oct 24: Rock City, Nottingham
Oct 25: Roundhouse, London
Oct 26: O2 Academy, Bristol
