Before putting yourself back together, you tend to spend some time peering back into the ruins, at the distance travelled. This sense of emergence, from both personal loss and of frustration with an impersonal, social media-driven world, seems to have informed Sleepless Empire. Lacuna Coil are a band that has constantly developed rather than transformed. Compared to their last album of original material, 2019’s colossal Black Anima, this is partly a continuation of that music’s underlying ruin, but like all the Milan band’s albums, it’s a subtle realignment of that energy. For the most part, they’ve simply got heavier. The central theme in Oxygen and Gravity is the battle for clarity in an ever more complex society, but the real unifying factor is the sound. All 1...