Lacuna Coil’s breakthrough third album is entirely striking in the certainty of its songwriting. The Milan quintet’s 1999 debut In a Reverie and 2001’s Unleashed Memories remain excellent, but it wasn’t until Comalies that the sweet/savage interchange between vocalists Cristina Scabbia and Andrea Ferro was fully unleashed. It not only enlivened the album, but laid a foundational formula for every album since. And its testament to the strength of these compositions that the technique never devolved into definitive gimmick. The light and shade of Comalies leant against the strong bones of convention: Big intro. Soft verse. Soaring chorus. Soft verse. Brooding bridge. Soaring chorus on steroids to see you out. The band were already subverting the limits of the formula they’d finally embraced, achingly adorning it with nuance (“Tight Rope”), overbearing expressive need (“Daylight Dancer”) and two sides of a vocal coin that has yet to be equaled in value by the successors who found their inspiration here. “Heaven’s a Lie” led the charge into global recognition, but it’s opener “Swamped” that forever standardised Lacuna Coil at their best: A potent motif that only lets go when Ferro seethes with the promise of Scabbia rising to those symphonic, choral heights. A touch of orchestration. A tinge of their homeland’s traditional tones to begin and end. It still sounds like it was created yesterday. The songs on Comalies are riven with similarly listenable certainty, but more compulsive was the record’s uncertainty: Where will this band go from here? The directions felt endless, a fact accidentally (or not) embodied by the album art’s eyed sunflower and its all-seeing petals that notably overpower the album title itself. Two of these directions seemed the most likely. Will Lacuna Coil double down on the flickers of earnestness so common to Euro-metal acts as Italy’s answer to Finland’s Nightwish? Or will they purloin the unique proposition of Scabbia and Ferro to usher in a more timeless era of Evanescence? He screams. She sings. Nary a Can’t wake up! diversion into guaranteed carbon dating to be heard. It seemed the more obvious choice and by 2006’s Karmacode, it had clearly been made. It’s worth noting that Lacuna Coil had existed in one form or another for ten years prior to creating Comalies. Two decades since its release, it’s a stark reminder that truly definitive albums are not designed. They are born and raised.