The argument this record walks into is one the band cannot win by volume alone. After nearly thirty years and a stretch of albums that drifted towards modern rock, the Milan band has come back harder, and the press has taken that hardness as an answer in itself. It is not an answer. It is a decision, and decisions have to be judged by what they produce.
Lacuna Coil released Sleepless Empire through Century Media on 14 February 2025, eleven tracks and forty six minutes, their tenth album and the first since Black Anima in 2019. It was recorded between April and July 2024 at SPVN Studios in Como, produced and mixed by the band's own Marco Coti Zelati, who also played the bass, the guitars, the keyboards and the synthesisers on it, and mastered by Marco D'Agostino. Andrea Ferro and Cristina Scabbia sang, Richard Meiz drummed. Randy Blythe of Lamb of God guests on "Hosting the Shadow" and Ash Costello on "In the Mean Time". It charted at twenty in Germany and fourteen in Switzerland.
One fact from the making of it explains more than the press release does. Diego Cavallotti, the band's guitarist for eight years, left in June 2024, in the middle of the recording window, and the guitar parts on the finished album come partly from Coti Zelati and partly from Daniele Salomone, who was brought in afterwards, plays the solos on two tracks, and made his live debut that August. A record made by a band that lost its guitarist halfway through is going to sound like the work of a producer rather than a group, and this one does.
Where it works, it works through Scabbia. "Gravity" is the strongest thing here by a clear margin, a slow, dark piece with a chorus that actually lifts and a Latin chant underneath it, and her performance on it is among the best she has recorded. "Scarecrow" is the other one everybody names, and rightly: it balances weight against atmosphere instead of choosing, which is the thing this band used to do better than anyone. Set those two beside "I Wish You Were Dead", the most obviously commercial track on the album, and you can hear the record pulling in two directions without committing to either.
The heaviness itself is the problem, or rather what it displaced. Ferro has largely given up the cracked half-sung delivery that used to sit between his screams and Scabbia's clean lines, and the reviewer at RockmusicRaider was right to miss it, because that voice was the hinge the band's whole sound swung on. What replaces it is competent modern harsh vocal work, and competent modern harsh vocal work is available everywhere. When the album chugs, and it chugs often, it sounds like a great many other bands. When it slows down and lets the two voices do what only these two voices do, it sounds like nobody else.
A band this distinctive should not be spending half an album sounding like the field it used to lead.
The critical split is real and it falls exactly along that line. Metal Hammer heard bone-crushing riffs and hooks and called the gothic metal crown safe. Distorted Sound gave it six out of ten and said the good moments keep getting buried under average ones. At least one reviewer has been blunter still, hearing alternative metal wearing a gothic skin and a death metal mask. We think the sixes and sevens have it. "Hosting the Shadow" is the cleanest illustration: one outlet calls it the strongest track on the record, another notes that it works as a feature for a guest singer borrowed from another band, and both are correct, which is not a compliment to a group with two vocalists of its own.
The title is worth a line, because it is the most thought-out thing about the album. Cristina Scabbia told Blabbermouth in January 2025 that the sleepless empire is an empire of people who never stop doing things, and she was careful to place herself inside it rather than above it: not a criticism, she said, an observation she is also guilty of. That is a good idea for a gothic metal record in 2025, and the writing on the album never quite catches up with it. The songs about exhaustion are the fast ones.
Nothing here is badly made. The production is heavy and clean, the drums land, and after five years away a record that sounds this confident is not a failure. But an album is judged whole, and whole, this one has three or four songs worth returning to and seven that pass. The best two tracks are better than the album, and that gap is the review.