LACUNA COIL's SCABBIA, FERRO Explain 'Delirium' Album Title, Discuss Band's Heavier New Direction (Audio)

Planetmosh recently conducted an interview with Cristina Scabbia and Andrea Ferro of Italian heavy rockers LACUNA COIL. You can now listen to the chat in the YouTube clip below. A couple of excerpts follow (transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET).

On the title of LACUNA COIL's new album, "Delirium":

Cristina: "The title came from… It actually came out while we were working on the 'Delirium' song; there's a song on the record that has the same title. And while we were working on music and lyrics at the same time, this word popped out and came out and opened a lot of doors, and we started to think about the whole Universe. We thought about the overall idea, we thought about the location, we imagined this asylum, this fictional asylum based on a real abandoned asylum that we visited. So it really came out during the songwriting. It's something that came out in such a weird way, because it really, really let it all start."

Andrea: "Basically, once we found the word, we thought about connecting the concept of the record, the concept of the mental illness with the smaller topic of everyday craziness — the craziness you experience personally every day in real life. Some of us went through some depression, some other people had some family problem that forced them to experience a different moment in their life. And so we played with the symptoms and we did a bit of research about the characteristics of each mental illness and then drag it into this concept, which is we imagined a sanitorium, a LACUNA COIL sanitorium, like the record, basically, and every song is like a room of the sanitorium where a patient is facing a different kind of illness. So, for example, in the song 'You Love Me 'Cause I Hate You', we took inspiration from the Stockholm Syndrome, which is when you fall in love with a person that is keeping you prisoner. But, of course, we've never been kept prisoners, so the real story is about a love story, a relationship where you are imprisoned, and even if you know it's very toxic for you, you can't get out of it, because you think it's the right thing, so you try everything possible to save it, to make it work, although you know it's not gonna happen. So this is the kind of metaphors we've been using once we found the concept, basically."

On why "Delirium" ended up being a heavier album than some of the recent LACUNA COIL records:

Cristina: "We already had the feeling that this would be a much heavier record, just because we… You see it, when you start to write music, to put down the new compositions, you kind of see the general direction. Of course, everything can change, but at the very beginning, we started to work on something more heavy. And plus, we just realized that even during the live shows, we were enjoying much more to perform the most energetic songs out of the LACUNA COIL catalog. So we definitely wanted to do something different, not only compared to the previous records we did — at least the last ones — but we wanted to do something pretty different from the bands that, in our genre, were doing, in a way, because maybe fans and press, whatever, people were expecting us to go softer and maybe more into a rock direction while we went the other way around and made it heavy. I'm happy that this record is surprising a lot of people — really happy — 'cause that's kind of the reaction that we were hoping for."

Andrea: "That's also one of the reasons why we opened the record with a song like 'The House Of Shame', which is one of the heaviest songs of the record. We really wanted people to say, 'What is this? Is it LACUNA COIL really?' That's exactly the effect that we wanted. We wanted this record to be just another record, just because we have to put it out. We wanted it to be something that said, 'Okay, this is LACUNA COIL in 2016, opening a new chapter in their career and just showing that they're still interested in experimenting with their music,' and going places we haven't been so far."

"Delirium" will be released on May 27 through Century Media. The CD was recorded at BRX Studio in Milan between December 2015 and February 2016. The effort was produced by LACUNA COIL bassist and main songwriter Marco "Maki" Coti-Zelati, with engineering by Marco Barusso and additional assistance from Dario Valentini. Coti-Zelati also created the artwork for "Delirium", which is based on an atmospheric session captured by Italian photographer Alessandro Olgiati.

Photo credit: Alessandro Olgiati