LACUNA COIL Singer On 'Dark Adrenaline': 'This Album Is The Heaviest We've Ever Done'

Radio Metal recently conducted an interview with vocalist Cristina Scabbia of Italian heavy rockers LACUNA COIL. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Radio Metal: ["Dark Adrenaline"] is your second album with Don Gilmore as the producer, while the others were produced by Waldemar Sorychta. What motivated you to switch producers? Do you think Don Gilmore understands better today what your music is about? Is the chemistry between you and Don better?

Scabbia: I think every band usually changes producer with every album. It's always cool to have somebody that can come up with a point of view that's different from the band's. After so many albums with Waldemar, we just thought that we'd learned so much, and that we'd got to the point where we needed to achieve and to learn something different from a different person, a different teacher, a different producer. Don is a very good professional and an amazing person, but he doesn't change our style. The songs were ready; he didn't write anything. But he's really at giving advice that you are free to follow or not. For example, regarding the structure of the songs, some part may have been too long or kind of useless for the song itself, so maybe we could make the part shorter. Or maybe we could rework some parts that weren't that strong in every song. So he's really good at that, but he's not the producer that changes the soul of the band or puts too much input in it.

Radio Metal: The artwork features vials that contain this dark adrenaline. Metaphorically, what do these bottle represent?

Scabbia: We imagined this dark liquid that can be injected inside of you to let you trip. Obviously, we're not talking about drugs. It's not like we're supporting heroin or anything like that. It's just a visual thing that we liked to imagine. In one of the special editions for "Dark Adrenaline", there will be a DVD with six mini videos that we filmed, where we're playing actors. It's not a making-of, but these six videos you will see in the next future will explain more about this "Dark Adrenaline" theme.

Radio Metal: LACUNA COIL never repeat themselves with any album, but this time, "Dark Adrenaline" seems to be a great mixture of all the different parts of the evolution of the band — from the gothic vibe of the early days to the new metal sound of an album like "Karmacode". With this album, did you feel the need to take stock, to recap what you have been doing so far?

Scabbia: No, it was something we realized after we let people listen to the album. It's not something we planned. But whether we like it or not, what we are today is a summary of what we lived in the past. The old-school vibe, the stuff that we did in the past, it's still a part of us, even if we're not looking back. It came up in the songwriting, but we weren't planning that. We weren't planning to recreate something we did in the past, or to create a mix of the old and the new. But it's nice to notice, because it's still us.

Radio Metal: About this new album, you declared in an interview:, "We're kind of getting heavier while everybody else is getting mellower." Do you really mean that? Do you really see other bands getting softer?

Scabbia: Yes, I think so. I see a lot of other bands in our own genre — but I'm not going to name names — that are pretty much following what we did a few years ago. They're going into more melodic, mainstream sonorities, and we're doing the opposite. We're doing something completely different from everybody else. It would have been easier for us, now that we enter the charts at a very high position, to do something even softer, or rock, or radio-oriented. Instead we went into something that is heavier. This album is the heaviest we've ever done. This is not going to make everything easy for us to be played on the radio and to get more support.

Radio Metal: As an established band, maybe that's something you can do more easily…

Scabbia: I don't know. That may be true, but there are so many bands now that if a radio station wants to play a specific style, they have a big variety of bands to choose from. They don't have to play you.

Radio Metal: Can you see yourselves getting even heavier in the future?

Scabbia: I don't know. We found out that we enjoy playing the heavier stuff we wrote during the live shows, because there's more energy. It's easier to let the energy come out when we play something more energetic. I can definitely see ourselves going in this direction, but we still don't know. We won't know until it's time to write the new album and we're inspired by stuff that will happen from now on. We'll see.

Radio Metal: The album was initially supposed to be released in 2011, but the release date was then pushed back to 2012. And yet, most journalists were lucky enough to listen to the album some time ago already. Was there a reason behind this delay or is it just a marketing thing from the label?

Scabbia: It was a marketing thing; it was not up to us. The label just decided to move the release date in January, so they could have more time to work on a better marketing and promotional plan. It also meant more budget. It's always good for a band, especially nowadays, because the funds are really limited. It's good to have a bigger budget to work, to go on tour and to promote the album.

You can read the entire interview at Radio Metal.

"Trip The Darkness" (new song) audio stream:

"Kill The Light" (new song) performance footage: