Cradle of Filth: Existence is Futile

Thirty years ago, the streets of Suffolk split in two as the devil’s children known as CRADLE OF FILTH crawled out of hell and into our earth. Composing a wicked symphony of gothic, symphonic and black metal, they’ve spread their own satanic gospel and got themselves wrapped up in waves of controversy. They’ve made friends with horror icons and got held at gunpoint in the Vatican, and they’re still here to tell the tale.

As they enter their fourth decade, they offer up their thirteenth album as their latest sacrificial offering. For an album titled Existence Is Futile, it’s funny to think a museum trip in Madrid got it off the ground.

“I used to go out with a girl a couple of years ago in Madrid, and we’d always go to The Prado,” explains frontman Dani Filth, lounging in the comforts of catering at Bloodstock Festival 2021. “In Room 13, strangely enough, it’s got Bosch’s Garden Of Earthly Delights and The Haywain Triptych, and it’s even got Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death. I was like ‘fuck me, this is the best room’ and it all spiralled from there.”

It’s Hieronymous Bosch’s infamous Garden of Earthly Delights that Existence Is Futile’s artwork, and some of its themes, come from. In particular, the cover depicts CRADLE OF FILTH‘s own twisted take on the third frame, a world in which humans succumb to evil temptations and reap eternal damnation.

For CRADLE OF FILTH – completed by bassist Daniel Firth, drummer Marthus Skaroupka, guitarists Richard Shaw and Ashok, and keyboardist Anabelle Iratni – the painting made them look at the world around them, resulting in a series of existential crises. “It just comes from the fact that life is too short so you need to make something of it, because life can be kind of depressing, like there’s no reason to life, or there’s no grand scheme, and you’re not part of a bigger plan. But it can be exhilarating, like ‘oh, you don’t have to worry about much, just enjoy the ride’ and so there’s this positive undercurrent, it’s not all negative and nihilistic, although it certainly feels that way sometimes.”

You read that right, readers – a CRADLE OF FILTH album that has ‘positive undercurrents.’ What’s happening to the world post-pandemic, right? Well, as it turns out, there’s plenty of curveballs from CRADLE OF FILTH this time round, including some sharp turns into political and social commentary.

“It feels like we’re accelerating towards a crescendo, like it looks like it’s kicking off in Afghanistan again but hopefully we don’t go back to the way things were. We just did the green summit, and we’ve got the aim to be carbon neutral and stop burning too many fossil fuels, so hopefully people see it as a bit of a warning from Mother Nature, you know?”

Don’t get the holy water and crosses out just yet though, there’s no need for CRADLE OF FILTH to repent as they’re not going to get too political, they promise. “We don’t want to get too political, that’d be awful. Metal is about escapism, you don’t want it to turn into a platform for your own political opinions, because nobody is interested in that. People buy a CRADLE record because they want escapism and high born drama, they don’t want to be preached to.”

Perhaps preaching isn’t the kind of thing CRADLE fans want, but whatever they’re doing, it’s working as the band’s built a legacy that continues to grow. It’s something they’re fully aware of and are using as a platform to push Existence Is Futile to the top of their discography. “You’ve got CRADLE fans who saw us way back in the day bringing their kids to see us, and it’s not long till they’re bringing their kids, so you’ve got three generations of CRADLE fans across three decades,” beams guitarist Richard Shaw, putting his hood up to hide from a flurry of rain backstage at Bloodstock. “We can celebrate the past, but we feel really positive about this – we couldn’t be a heritage band and rely on our back catalogue.”

In fact, CRADLE’s ability to bring in new blood like Richard and keyboardist Anabelle over the years has meant they’re forever reinventing their own wheel. It’s something they’re always talking about, and it’s a conversation they had frequently as their thirtieth birthday approached. “You could literally release the greatest album of your career, and someone will still compare it to an album they’ve spent 20 years listening to” Richard laughs. “Whether it will pass alongside those classic albums is hard to say, but that’s no reason to not try to bring out the best album of our career 30 years later.”

Existence Is Futile is every era of CRADLE OF FILTH dialled up to ten. Taking their extreme metal roots and fleshing it out with sweeping orchestral suites and progressive soundscapes, it’s a theatrical tour of their very own necromantic fantasies. Although, ask the band and they’ll tell you it’s the sound of them stripping it back to basics.

“When you spend a lot of time on it like we did, you might expect it to be overdone but in actual fact, the time we spent on it allowed us to really strip it back by going ‘hey, less is more’” explains Dani, reflecting on their longest gap between records ever at four years. “You can’t make something sound bigger by piling loads of stuff on it, it’ll just make it sound smaller so we tried to very minimal, you know, by not tracking three guitars on this side and three guitars on that side – everything had it’s place. If you strip it back, you get rid of the chaff, as it were.”

Saying that, there’s still a never-ending desire to be the theatrical kings and queens of heavy metal, as Richard admits: “I think CRADLE OF FILTH will always be an albums band because we want to be that larger than life thing, and I think you get that with this album – it ebbs and flows and takes you to places, and you can’t get that from a single unless you have a million ingredients.”

Ironically, their grand opening of the Existence Is Futile-era was made up of as many ingredients as you could possibly think of. Their stage show at Bloodstock Festival was their very own Garden of Earthly Delights: Anabelle is encased in a vine-riddled wonderland, Dani runs up and down castle-like stairwells, and there’s so much pyro it feels like the Devil himself is on stage. In fact, it’s that pyro that almost put an end to their set prematurely.

“We didn’t rehearse with fire and at the front, it was sucking all of the oxygen, so I was doing these big screams and I was teetering on the border of blacking out, like my hands felt massive and my hearing went narrow and I was standing on the top thinking ‘don’t fall off this’ – especially if there’s fire, imagine falling off and catching fire,” he laughs his trademark laugh, adding, “we always do Bloodstock with a bang.”

It’s true, the era of Existence Is Futile marks a stark move away from the days of being bottled by gobstoppers at Catton Park – an incident which involved band members being rushed to Derby’s A&E department ‘strapped to a gurney with their stage costume on, and all the make up and big spikes.’ These days, they arrive as KREATOR’s main support, and applauded like heroes.

As CRADLE OF FILTH enter their fourth decade, they bring with them an album that sounds like the champions of extreme metal they’ve become over the years. Whether you’re “one of our haters” or “one of our champions” as Richard jests, you can’t deny “CRADLE OF FILTH are timeless.”

Existence Is Futile is out now via Nuclear Blast Records.

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