Lacuna Coil’s ambitious brand of goth-inflected metal has long revolved around the vocal interplay between Cristina Scabbia and Andrea Ferro. When the band formed in Milan, Italy, in 1994, the co-vocalists not only helped define the group’s identity, but provided a simple light and shade contrast—Scabbia’s beautiful singing versus Ferro’s anguished shouting—that would go on to push tracks like 2002’s “Unspoken” into breakout territory. To this day their vocal partnership is key to their ongoing evolution. The band began by embracing an earnest European style of metal on their 1999 debut LP, In a Reverie, as evidenced by efforts like “Cold” and “Falling Again”. By their breakthrough third album, 2002’s Comalies, they’d started building the foundations of their bespoke halfway house: somewhere between the stompy sensibilities of nu-metal and the symphonic moodiness of gothic metal. The echoes of its construction rattled with “Swamped” and “Heaven’s a Lie”, vibrant threads of an album so important to the band’s future tapestry it was entirely restitched 20 years later as Comalies XX. Reimagined from the ground up, “Swamped XX” and “Tight Rope XX” are altogether as dark and impassioned as their original renditions, but—almost shockingly, given the decades between—hit with a newly immense density. The band not only doubled down on improving what defined them—they got heavier. That ferocity is also on display in “Trip the Darkness” and “Delirium”, while the intensity of “The House of Shame” and “Layers of Time” wouldn’t be out of place on a melodic death metal record. Just as the band have evolved, so too have Ferro’s vocals. Formerly Scabbia’s strictly growling counterpart throughout the ’90s, he now steeps his seething in bouts of soaring melody (“I Won’t Tell You”) while proving himself capable of harmonising with his co-vocalist (“Apocalypse”), whose almost operatic vocal ability has grown stronger over time. It’s a testament to Lacuna Coil that their penchant for covering beloved classics and doing them transcendent justice often goes unmentioned: Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” and R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” are so striking, they’d easily overshadow a band less intent on self-perfection.