It's 2005, and on a freezing cold December night in the Hollywood Hills, Lacuna Coil vocalist Cristina Scabbia can hear the sound of howling in the distance. She’s there to film one of four music videos for the Italian gothic metal band’s fourth record, Karmacode, and the production crew have warned them not to venture too far from the set in the dark, as there are mountain lions and coyotes in the hills.
Today’s shoot is for Our Truth, which is set to be the album’s lead single, and will become a mainstay of their live sets for the next 20 years. Fake snow floats around the singer like confetti as she artfully twirls a Japanese-style parasol, a nod to the song’s use of the traditional shamisen in its iconic intro. Destined for heavy rotation on MTV’s Headbangers Ball, Our Truth was the first “super-professional” music video the band ever made, according to Cristina.
“We became way more popular in Europe [after 2002 album Comalies] and everywhere else as a consequence of that,” reminisces vocalist and founding member Andrea Ferro about that period. “The band really took off and became a much bigger entity than it was before.”
Lacuna Coil’s third album, Comalies had indeed helped them go truly international. It broke into the US Billboard 200 at No.178, getting into the Top 10 of both the Independent and Heatseekers album charts in the country. Extensive radio play of single Heaven’s A Lie helped widen their appeal further, and they were ultimately invited to join the line-up of Ozzfest in 2004.
Chosen to perform on the tour’s second stage among the male-dominated line-up of Lamb Of God, Slipknot and Hatebreed, the bands took turns playing different slots each night, giving Lacuna Coil the chance to get top billing in front of a whole new audience.
“I remember that we got extra attention,” muses Cristina. “We were completely different compared to the other bands, because we weren’t Americans. We were bringing the European touch. After Ozzfest, we came back to Europe with a different level of attention on us, and a different kind of pressure. Everybody wanted us. Everybody was curious about our next move. And of course, we had the pressure of the next record.”
Our Truth was, in a way, the band’s direct response to that pressure; at a time when they could easily have lost their way amid the surge in popularity and demand, they dug their heels in and made a statement that they would keep their integrity intact.
“Lyrically, it was our way of saying we don’t care what people want us to do,” says Cristina. “We just want to be ourselves. Because you know how it is – as soon as you’re kind of popular, everybody wants to help you, to work with you, to give you advice.”
“But I remember that back then, maybe with a hint of ingenuity, we said, ‘No’. Which can be good and bad,” she admits. “We wanted to make sure that we’d be genuine and do exactly what we wanted to do. We probably made some mistakes along the way, but we made them because we decided to.”
Andrea echoes Cristina’s analysis of the song. “It’s also a personal song about relationships, about the passing of time and the fact that we were away from people for a long time,” he adds. “You start to have complications with people from home that don’t understand what you do – because it’s hard to understand, obviously. So, it was a mix of the two themes.”
Despite their desire to “push away the pressure”, as Andrea puts it, the band knew that a follow-up to Comalies had to be special if they were to match its success. They approached recording Karmacode with a markedly bigger budget, the use of a real string orchestra, and the opportunity to exert even more control over their output as co-producers. Otherwise though, they worked much as they had previously.
Bassist Marco Coti Zelati and guitarists Marco ‘Maus’ Biazzi and Cristiano ‘Pizza’ Migliore wrote the music, with Cristina and Andrea coming up with the vocal melodies and lyrics. Musically, Our Truth puts Asian and Middle Eastern melodies front and centre, Cristina’s vocal running up and down the Phrygian dominant scale. The band also employed a delicately plucked Japanese shamisen introduction, adding a global twist to their usual gothic influences.
“We’re really stable with our taste,” says Cristina. “Type O Negative will always be in the Olympus, and we’ll always love Paradise Lost.”
“But we’ve also always liked Arabic-style melodies and improvised that vocal,” clarifies Andrea. “We love the song Temple Of Love by Sisters Of Mercy, with [Israeli singer] Ofra Haza, which has that typically Middle Eastern melody. That’s where our inspiration came from.”
The pair also acknowledge that Italy has always had special cultural ties with the Arab world. “Italy has always been a land of passage and domination, due to its position in the Mediterranean Sea,” Andrea explains with an academic air. “In the south of Italy, especially Naples, the traditional music has a lot of that influence because of past domination going back centuries. Also, you have to think that Sicily and the south of Italy are very close to Turkey and North Africa. The main religion of the south was Islam for a long time. So, there has always been that influence in Italian music – it’s kind of in our DNA.”
“It just happened,” agrees Cristina. “It was incidental, and we liked it, so we kept it in. Everything that comes out, comes out because we like the sound, and it fills our hearts.”
What Lacuna Coil mainly wanted to achieve with this vocal melody was something that fans could grab onto in a live setting. “It immediately reminded us of a stadium chorus, something that everybody could sing altogether, which is something we enjoy a lot,” explains Cristina. “Our shows are very, very connected to our crowds. We don’t like separation. This is where Our Truth really comes alive: onstage.”
Karmacode was also the first album the band recorded in their home city of Milan instead of at longtime producer and friend Waldemar Sorychta’s Woodhouse Studios in Germany. But the real pinch-me moment came when they travelled to Galaxy Studios in Mol, Belgium to mix the album with Grammy-nominated engineer Ronald Prent. The band spent a month in Belgium among all the trappings of rock stardom they had previously only dreamed of: private chefs, football fields, helipads, and massively sophisticated equipment.
“It was a completely different environment for us,” recalls Andrea. “Faith No More used to record in that studio. Rammstein. Bruce Dickinson recorded vocals for Iron Maiden there. It was something big; you could tell from all the gold records on the wall. It was like we’d been transported to a different dimension.”
The lead single for Karmacode, Our Truth first popped up on the soundtrack for the appropriately gothy werewolf versus vampire sequel Underworld: Evolution in January 2006, before being released a month later. The track was also Lacuna Coil’s first to chart in multiple territories, breaking into the Top 40 in the UK, the US Billboard Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks and at home in Italy, where it peaked at No.23. Given the mounting excitement over the band, it wasn’t exactly a surprise, but to Cristina, it cemented that they were on the right track.
“I think that we… not established ourselves, that would be a little pretentious,” she muses. “But we were happy, the fans were happy, and we determined once again that Lacuna Coil were active and delivering what was promised.”
While the success was hard-won, the band admit they knew something special was about to happen on Our Truth. A week before it came out, they leaked a fake file for the song online that contained only four minutes of white noise as a litmus test. In just a week, they had three million downloads. A staple of their setlist since its release, the song has become one of the band’s most iconic anthems.
“Obviously it’s more fun to play a newer song because it’s fresher,” concedes Andrea, “but that one is always fun because people have been waiting for it. It’s a matter of respecting the crowd. Not everybody is a hardcore fan, so it’s good to have songs that everybody knows, you know? “But when they sing along, it’s fun for us, even if we’re playing it for the millionth time. It’s a happy moment.”
Lacuna Coil's new album Sleepless Empire is out February 14 via Century Media. The band's UK tour continues in Bournemouth on October 18 - for the full list of dates, visit the band's official website.
