LACUNA COIL Ignite The Fire Tour Plus Guests

It was October of 2002, and the turn of the millennium saw the world of heavy music in flux. If you were paying attention to the press then you’d have probably been reading about the chart-smashing successes of bands like Korn and Queens of the Stone Age, and while Nu Metal was undeniably king, the angst-ridden musical fragmentation of the 90s had produced a panoply of genre-bending up-and-comers who refused to sit comfortably in any pre-ordained category or play by the creative rules laid out for them. It would swiftly transform the musical landscape in ways nobody could have predicted, and riding the crest of that wave was a humble Italian outfit who dared to dream big.

Lacuna Coil had already been around for eight years, and their two previous releases – 1999’s debut In A Reverie and 2001’s Unleashed Memories via longtime label Century Media had roundly established them as a formidable studio and live act spearheaded by Andrea Ferro and Cristina Scabbia’s pitch-forked vocal delivery, but the gulf between Milan’s most promising exports and wider recognition was down to more than geography alone. While the genetic material for 2002’s Comalies was already in place in the form of bassist and songwriter-in-chief
Marco ‘Maki’ Coti-Zelati, Lacuna Coil’s third release was the pivotal moment that would usher in a globe and decade-spanning career. All that said, while the landmark release would undeniably change their destiny forever, what is now undeniably an anthem laden millennial classic was anything but an overnight success. If anything, it established Lacuna Coil as a band with the stamina to go the distance and much of the climbing still lay ahead.

Now, 20 years later, Lacuna Coil decided to revisit the songs, but not to just re record the songs as they were, but deconstruct and transport them into 2022. “This is not a reboot or a spin-off or anything like that,” says vocalist Cristina Scabbia.”We just wanted to give these songs a 2022 dress and see how this guy or girl who was born 20 years ago would still look fucking slick in 2022.

Kerrang! Magazine counts New Years Day among an elite handful of bands inspiring the next generation. Led by “the vibrant force of nature that is frontwoman Ash Costello,” New Years Day unleash anthems of discontent and empowerment, delivered with gothic flair and theatrical bombast.

It’s a sound that crashed into the Mainstream Rock Top 40 for the first time in 2019 with a top 15 rock radio charting single "Shut Up" followed up by the cathartic “Hurts Like Hell,” which finished 2022 as one of SiriusXM Octane’s Top 25 songs of the year. Each successive victory is a celebration of hard-fought creative freedom, unstoppable determination, and dedicated fans. Throngs of diehards and newcomers alike sing and sweat along with New Years Day, at festivals, in clubs, or on tours with Halestorm, Falling In Reverse, Motionless In White, Ice Nine Kills and In This Moment.

Saints and sinners, victims and victors. In sound and vision, New Years Day walk the line between darkness and light. The band’s duality comes to fruition on their new album Half Black Heart, an unrepentant and unashamed album championing discovery, from the darkest secrets to one’s inner strength. It’s a message destined to connect with those who struggle with self-acceptance and who fight to belong.

“What’s pumping blood into our veins and keeping this band alive is our absolutely

diehard fanbase,” Costello declares. “They are the heart of the band. And so, the Half Black Heart is dedicated to them.”

Half Black Heart is full of themes of struggle, conquering one’s own fear, and

confronting adversaries.

The unapologetically heavy “Vampyre” is a searing rebuke of malignant narcissism, a personality disorder responsible for incalculable harm on friends and romantic partners who suffer in silence. “‘Vampyre’ is about a certain type of person who sucks the life out of you emotionally. It’s a song for anyone who has dealt with this type of person. It insists, ‘You’re not going to drain the life from me.’”

“Secrets” unravels the double and triple lives led by the deceitful, whose power derives from constant lies. “Bulletproof” is about those moments when an abusive partner’s mask begins to slip.

“Enemy” is about a specific type of realization. “You’re sleeping with the enemy. You’re literally in bed with that person,” Ash explains. “You realize, ‘Not only do I need to get out of this bed, I need to burn it.”

Unrestrained fury collides with arena-ready glamor, confrontational DIY passion, and melodic hooks. Where earlier material saw Costello discovering her strengths as a songwriter and band leader, Half Black Heart puts that strength into undeniable action. Ash and guitarist Nikki Misery (by her side since 2011) are rejoined by the trio of guitarist Jeremy Valentyne, bassist Brandon Wolfe, and drummer Trixx, all of whom first joined New Years Day in 2015 and recently returned.

“I feel like I’m in a dream” Ash says. “When people ask me what it feels like to have

this lineup back and our team around us, I answer that my little black heart is so full. It’s bursting at the seams with joy.”

“Hurts Like Hell,” “Vampyre,” “Bulletproof,” “Fearless,” the title track, and the rest of Half Black Heart join an already impressive catalog of songs, like “Come for Me,”

“Skeletons,” “Kill or Be Killed,” and “Shut Up.” Fans have streamed “Angel Eyes” more than 14 million times on Spotify alone.

Victim to Villain (2013), Malevolence (2015), and Unbreakable (2019) deeply resonate with listeners who cherish them as timeless keepsakes, marking different times in their own personal evolution. It’s because Costello, who skillfully conjures horror and comic book aesthetics as allegory, is one of them.

Costello was a long way from her triumphant, breathtaking performance at WWE

WrestleMania 37, where she sang Rhea Ripley’s theme song when she first dreamt up her band in Anaheim, California. She vividly remembers growing up, worshipping bands like My Chemical Romance and AFI, dreaming of a life of deeper connection and bigger meaning in worlds beyond her window.

The adoring “half-heads” who champion Ash online understand that their Scream

Queen, who cites Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses as her favorite movie and DC antihero Harley Quinn as her muse, is just like them. She’s a bundle of insecurity and mental health struggles, with an unwavering commitment to her art, equal parts victorious-onstage-siren and shy, reserved homebody. New Years Day captures that complexity, with each new song more confessional and relatable than the last.

Half Black Heart, Produced by Mitchell Marlow (Papa Roach, Starset, In This Moment) and Scott Stevens (Shinedown, Halestorm, Dorothy, Nothing More, Lilith Czar), Unbreakable opened at No. 3 on the Hard Music Albums chart on the heels of the Top 50 debut of Malevolence on Billboard’s Top Albums chart. Distorted Sound hailed the “excellent” Unbreakable as “without question” the band’s strongest work. Loudwire included it on their list of 2019’s Best Rock Albums, alongside the likes of Bring Me The Horizon and blink-182.

The band spent much of 2022 and 2023 working with Marlow and Stevens on their

career-defining fifth album. Half Black Heart resurrects the chemistry of the New Years Day lineup that first crystalized on Malevolence, with the experience and confidence earned during Unbreakable.

“So much of Unbreakable was about having to be strong through hard times,” Ash says. “It was important to stare my fear in its face. I discovered my strength during that process. There are still dark themes on Half Black Heart, but now it’s about knowing I'll be okay because I believe in my newly discovered strength. I’ve got this.”

In cinematic music videos, transcendent live performances, and daily interaction (virtual or in-person) with like-minded misfits, this band makes pleasure from pain. Even when it hurts like hell.

The swashbuckling gothic pirates in New Years Day summon hooky hard rock with wit, charm, and a vengeance. Like the music that shaped Ash Costello – including the larger-than-life and seemingly superhuman heights of Garbage and Michael Jackson, the sorrowful heartbreak of The Smiths, to the soaring and empowering songs she sings today - New Years Day turns adversity into strength.

LINEUP

Ash Costello – Vocals

Nikki Misery – Lead Guitar

Jeremy Valentyne – Guitar

Brandon Wolfe – Bass

Trixx – Drums

Texas-based New Southern Gothic outfit OCEANS OF SLUMBER transmogrify on incredible new album, Starlight and Ash. The chrysalis stage that lasted from Winter (2016) to wildly applauded Oceans Of Slumber (2020) is now over. Equipped with a profoundly deep musical background, a staunch reverence for the American South, and starry-eyed artistic curiosity, OCEANS OF SLUMBER have created a sonic expression like no other. They’ve become singular, the first entry (and likely not the last) into a style that can only be called New Southern Gothic. Fronted by the inimitable power, range, and grace of vocalist Cammie Beverly, Starlight and Ash posits OCEANS OF SLUMBER in a league of their own. This is as much eloquent extensions of famed singersongwriters Nick Cave and Chris Stapleton as it is the heartbreaking pulse of Type O Negative and Katatonia. Starlight and Ash isn’t Metal, but its edges are. “Sonically, I want to do our version of Nick Cave,” says songwriter/drummer Dobber Beverly. “I’m a huge fan of Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen. The brooding singer-songwriter types. I’m interested in exploring the romantic side of ’90s music. I grew up on Björk, Nick Cave, Southern Rock, Motown—basically, the combinations of music you find in Texas. Here, we have Blues, the hard stuff, Jazz, and so on. Our music is coastal, too. There’s voodoo here in the Gulf. We also want to harness that into our music and tell our stories. What we do in OCEANS OF SLUMBER hasn’t been easy to categorize in the past, but with Starlight and Ash, we now have an identity.” If the pandemic gave OCEANS OF SLUMBER anything, it was time to re-think their overall trajectory. The foundation was there. Evinced by singles “Winter,” “The Decay of Disregard,” “The Banished Heart,” and “A Return to the Earth Below,” the Texans continuously displayed impressive skill and compositional wherewithal. But the clues to OCEANS OF SLUMBER’s decade-long blossom on Starlight and Ash lie in their cover song treatment. From Candlemass’s “Solitude” and Type O Negative’s “Wolf Moon” to The Moody Blues’s “Nights in White Satin” and Pink Floyd’s “On the Turning Away,” they’ve hinted at a broader and deeper musical palette. With Starlight and Ash, OCEANS OF SLUMBER reveal they’re greater than the sum of their respective parts. This proved out yet again with a stirring cover of The Animals’ classic “House of the Rising Sun.” “I think what I’ve learned as a songwriter from doing cover songs is how to pull back compositionally,” Dobber Beverly says. “This music all came before me. I wanted to harness those influences. A good song sells like a good song. We’re at the point where we’re definable, but I’m not sure what that is exactly. We’re some kind of soul. We don’t reference everything we do, but we also are interested in finding ways to reference everything we do. There’s a documentary called Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus by Andrew Douglas. He had an interesting take on everything in the South, being saints or sinners or sinners and saved. The whole idea was that the wrong was the romantic and the saved being pious. We have the South and the Southern Gothic in us. That’s where we’re coming from.” While writing Starlight and Ash, Dobber Beverly realized OCEANS OF SLUMBER only had to empower the lightship that is Cammie Beverly. Waiting in the wings over four critically-acclaimed full-length albums, the frontwoman was put front and center at last. Indeed, Cammie Beverly demonstrated her potentiality on “Suffer the Last Bridge,” “Pray for Fire,” “No Color, No Light,” and “To the Sea (A Tolling of the Bells),” but she brings her conviction, vulnerability, and intensity to full bear on Starlight and Ash. She’s radiant on new singles “The Waters Rising,” “The Lighthouse,” and “The Hanging Tree.” The other side of Cammie Beverly’s emotionally- charged outlay can be heard in the moody “It’s Just a Day,” the agrestic “Hearts of Stone,” and the deceptively catchy “Star Altar.” “There are people born with a gift for singing,” says Dobber Beverly. “Cammie is one of them. We have so much lust for emotional content in Metal. People are always trying to latch onto something, even down to Bathory. It’s like getting drunk and crying to songs, reading their lyrics, and how they’re delivered. Why not bring something real into that conversation? Why not bring big voices to that conversation? That’s how the band started in the first place, but we’re at such a place where we can write songs based on our feelings. We want to show what Cammie’s capable of. Let’s show her range and diversity.” Lyrically, Starlight and Ash is cinematic. There is no era consideration, but it feels ominous, hopeless yet resolute. The band—Beverly, Beverly, Mat V. Aleman (keyboards), Semir Özerkan (bass), Jessie Santos (guitars), and Alexander Lucian (guitars)—employed Southern Gothic literary devices in a harrowing story about a fictitious coastal town. Across Starlight and Ash’s 11 songs, the town’s internal struggles, (forbidden) loves, tireless maritime toil, and faith are given vivid life (and death). Draped in nighttime summer humidity and iodine air, this is storytelling at its finest. A read through “The Lighthouse” and its companion piece “The Ship Builder’s Son” shows that OCEANS OF SLUMBER are as distinctive lyrically as they are musically. “Every album we’ve done is cinematic and literary,” Dobber Beverly says. “That’s what we’ve been trying to get across in this little world we’re in. If Charles Bukowski drank too much and got sad about his mom, we’re that night. Or, if Kurt Vonnegut had laid down another terrible ‘coming home from war’ theme, we’re channeling that. We put these types of things into our music. So, everything about this fictitious coastal town is either zoomed in on a particular person’s life or zoomed out on the town and how it reacts. Starlight and Ash is our most complete concept yet, and it’s quite beautiful.” OCEANS OF SLUMBER could’ve gone to any studio to capture Starlight and Ash. Rather than traversing the familiar, the Houstonians went to Studio G Brooklyn in Brooklyn, New York. Famed for hosting everything from They Might Be Giants and A Storm of Light to Kurt Vile and Unsane, Studio G Brooklyn and producer Joel Hamilton (Violet Road, Battle of Mice) transformed Starlight and Ash into a genuine powerhouse. Recorded over 20 days in June 2021, OCEANS OF SLUMBER’s fifth sounds dynamic, threatening, and delicate. The group enlisted Maor Appelbaum (Yes, Voivod) at Maor Appelbaum Mastering to handle the mastering. “I’m a big believer in hiring the people you want to work on it—letting them contribute their magic,” says Dobber Beverly. “Going to a place as prestigious as Studio G abides by that. We took our music to Joel Hamilton as an engineer and producer and let him work from there. I was familiar with what he had worked on. We listened to his recommendations. We wanted him to contribute. We wanted another set of ears, allowing him to help us develop what we were hearing. Joel is a big-time talent and, in reality, not really in our little world. But we met with him, and he understood that we were genuine and knew what we wanted to do. They worked with us because we have something special to offer.” Starlight and Ash is visually stunning, adorned with a striking Eliran Kantor (Testament, Heaven Shall Burn, Kirk Windstein) art and TheHeavyGlow/Jamie LaCombe photography. OCEANS OF SLUMBER have channeled music for our times, zeitgeist in sentiment but achingly elegant in its look forward. It’s wonderfully dark, vulnerable, beautiful, and troubled. After a decade of exploration, OCEANS OF SLUMBER have finally arrived on Starlight and Ash. Welcome to the New Southern Gothic.