Extreme metal legends Cradle Of Filth continue to revel in notorious misadventures with the release of their 14th studio album, The Screaming Of The Valkyries, on March 21st via Napalm Records.
For those unfamiliar and wondering, what exactly are The Valkyries? The word Valkyries comes from Scandinavian Mythology. It’s definition: any of the beautiful maidens attendant upon Odin who bring the souls of slain warriors to Valhalla and there wait upon them. Cradle Of Filth frontman Dani Filth confirms that as accurate, but then adds, “We’re not really taking it from Nordic Mythology. It’s a bit more of an all-encompassing kind of arch to the story – well, it’s not necessarily a story. That line appears in the very last song of the album, ‘When Misery Was A Stranger’. And the album starts on a very positive note with ‘To Live Deliciously’, and it finishes on a bit of a dark note; but it’s redeemable, the dark note, because this cataclysmic event happened in the lyricism. But in real life, which it parodies, we know we’re a few seconds away from the doomsday clock striking twelve.”
“There’s hope, but… The Screaming Of The Valkyries is a terminology, or analogy, to represent the onset of a cataclysmic event,” continues Dani. “If you were to witness a destructive power – like the flash of an atomic bomb going off. Or be on a beach and see a 200 ft. wave coming; it’s that inevitability of disaster. The same as if, theoretically, one day you hear this weird keening from the sky, like screaming. You’d know – oh my god – Heaven’s being overrun. Our last bastions, our last protectors of Heaven, Asgard, whatever, are being slain, and this is the end of everything. Ragnarok, great renewal, but generally not populous by humans. So yeah, it’s about the onset of a cataclysmic event. And, also, it sounds pretty heavy metal.”
There’s two songs on The Screaming Of The Valkyries with Latin titles – “Non Onmis Moriar” and “Ex Sanguine Draculae”. Dani explains his decision to utilize the ancient language of Latin. “Well, I have the latter tattooed on me, meaning ‘The Blood Of Dracula’. When the song was presented, I was blown away by it. It was written by our bassist, Daniel Firth; or Doogle, that’s what we call him. Immediately, it just reminded me of Dissection-era black metal. It just had this vibe about it. It was very reminiscent of the vibe I was getting when we doing Dusk, and Cruelty; maybe even Midian. So, I bought into that, and that was the perfect title for it as it just reeked of Vampirism.”
“As for the other one, ‘Non Onmis Moriar’ – Not All Of Me Shall Die. One of the most famous, oldest quotes, I think. Yes, this song is a bit more tragic. But again, it fosters hope, because it’s about someone reaching out to their loved one, a friend, a lover – whatever. A wife, a husband, saying that although I’m dying and I’m going to pass, I’m going to leave a piece of me with you. And you can return that when we meet in the afterlife. We always sort of venture into that tragic, dark territory. I think we did it with ‘Discourse Between A Man And His Soul’ on the last record; the ballad, I’d like to call it. But yeah, it’s got a sort of tragic, melancholic sadness about it.”
Musically, Napalm Records refers to “Non Omnis Moriar” as “the most mournful melody in the Cradle Of Filth catalog.” Furthermore, they call it, “a cousin to Paradise Lost or Anathema.” It certainly is different from the rest of the album in both tempo and structure. “Well, we recorded our first album, The Principle Of Evil Made Flesh, at Academy Studios (in Dewsbury, England) solely because My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost, and Anathema all recorded their classic doom metal albums there,” admits Dani. “I’d rather not say doom, cause I’m not a big fan of doom to be honest. I’m not a huge fan of Sabbath revival bands; Sabbath’s enough for me. I don’t need to hear 50 more. Just like I don’t need to hear 50 more Darkthrones. But I’d say gothic doom, because Gothic by Paradise Lost was such an immense cultural album. I say cultural because it was one of the first times I ever heard orchestral music with something this heavy. It just changed the way we were thinking about stuff. We immediately got a keyboardist after that. So yeah, they can relate back to those, and they’re glory days because when people talk about Anathema, they hardly ever mention the Darren White years. That was around the same period that Cradle toured with Anathema and At The Gates. We’re good friends with Anathema. We’d stay around Darren’s house with Emperor. We probably played with them as much as say, Moonspell as of late, because they’re the other band that we played with loads. But yeah, that link is just.”
The cover art for The Screaming Of The Valkyries is incredible; there’s so much to look at in this image created by an artist named Roberto Diaz. “We’d been working with Arturs Berzins for the sum of three albums, which we’ll refer to as our Nuclear Blast recordings. But we have a new label, Napalm, and a new album. We wanted to strike out in unfamiliar territory, try something new. It wasn’t easy because – well, nothing’s easy nowadays because everything seems to have morphed into one another, like scenes and genres. There’s a lot of repetitiveness. When I say repetitiveness, I mean things go round in cycles. So, we’ll have the thrash metal cycle soon, no doubt. Go back to grunge ruining everything in about ten years,” laughs Dani. “That being said, it is hard because the people who you’ve been mentors to, or you’ve been influential to; they don’t give a f*ck about you. They just do something that’s very similar. Obviously, subject matter and trying to do something new nowadays is a lot harder, just because of the enormity of what’s been done. The enormity of artistry across the world, and AI (Artificial Intelligence) really doesn’t help that either. Anyway, it was a lengthy sort of look. There wasn’t really a deadline for time, but I was leaving it a little bit late. Then I found this artist and hassled him. I basically gave him free reign. I gave him the lyrics to look at; this is how late in the day it was. He had all the lyrics and did his own interpretation of those. So, the artwork, as is normal for our albums, runs concurrently throughout the booklet. Lovely it is too.”
In the song “You Are My Nautilus”, Dani sings, “Leagues ahead, twenty thousand hissing in our wake.” And Nautilus is the name of Captain Nemo’s submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea. “Captain Nemo, not Nemo from Finding Nemo, let’s just make that clear. But yeah, it’s another analogy. I’m a big fan, as everybody knows, of Victoriana and steam punk. The Nautilus in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea was an actual ship, but it was deemed as being a mythical creature when it was first seen. Much like the Kraken. Captain Nemo was like a renegade captain who just traversed the globe doing what he wanted really because he was exceptionally rich, which included sinking other people’s ships, and discovering new lands. But basically, he was an entrepreneur. He was like a visionary. And I’m alluding this to another person who is like a rock, a bedrock. Someone who’s… you’re my Nautilus is saying to someone, you’re my backbone, you’re my adventurer. You are my captain, you are my guide in the darkest depths, etc. etc.”
Obviously, Dani has read the book, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, by French writer Jules Verne, which was first published in 1870. Many years later, in 1954, Disney released a movie adaptation starring Kirk Douglas. “It was amazing! And I’ve seen all the footage behind the scenes as well when they did the octopus attack. The Nautilus in that film was very reminiscent of Metropolis, and that kind of silent era style. But it has a very unique look. It could be dragged from the ’50s Flash Gordon movies as well. It’s got that very stylized look. I loved it as a kid. I also loved The Nautilus in The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which was a bit of a hodge podge movie, but The Nautilus remained cool as f*ck.”
Musically, Martin “Marthus” Skaroupka’s drums are so different in that song, as compared to the rest of the album; as well as what he’s played on previous Cradle records. That being said, Dani’s signature vocal shriek is ever-present. And there’s dueling guitars which led Napalm to refer to it as, “The darkest song Iron Maiden never wrote.” The stylistic changes that come together on The Screaming Of The Valkyries are tremendous. It’s quite a varied collection of songs, yet it’s all undeniably Cradle. Dani talks about the divergent avenues that are travelled musically on this record.
“Well, surprise, surprise, we have another lineup change; albeit three years now. And things are going very well in the band. You can benchmark that against the fact that Zoe and Ashok, our keyboardist / backing singer and one of our guitarists have married. I attended their wedding in Arizona at the beginning of the year; it was fantastic. Zoe is one of two people (the other being guitarist Donny Burbage), two Americans that joined back in 2022, when we were kind of dumped by previous members at the very last minute, and we were unable to get visas for anybody European. We were special guests to Danzig. Didn’t want to lose the tour, didn’t want to let Glenn down. So, we found, very quickly, two replacements. But I didn’t realize quite how much behind the scenes work had gone into finding them. There was criteria and a checklist, and they ticked all the boxes. Part of that was obviously the fact that they were fans of the band before. And they were knowledgeable about Cradle.”
“In the last three years, we played so many gigs. The album took about a year to record because we were constantly touring. So, we’d do a bit here, a bit there, etc. etc. The album was actually delivered to the record label back in July (2024), so this is my second wind of enjoying it. Cause normally after an album is finished, I generally play it to death, and then I’m sick and tired of it forever. But I’ve had to drag it out again because obviously I’m doing press. I’m back in love with the album, which is strange cause the second wind doesn’t usually happen like this. Not that the album’s bad, it’s just that every time I do an album, I’ve been in the studio with it. I know every f*cking note, every drum beat. And one quickens the sickness with that kind of thing. Not because it’s bad, just overheard it. But now, second wind, and the modus operandi for launching the album was really, we’re going to deliver something on our own terms. We’re not going to deliver a special edition.”
“I remember on the last record, everybody was like, ‘Great album! But it’s a little long.’ Yes, because you bought the special edition, which is another 14 minutes longer; and, of course, makes the album extremely long. I couldn’t listen to it all in one fell swoop. Just the same as my favorite films, I probably couldn’t watch if they were an extra hour longer. So, with that in mind, we just wanted to deliver – as back in the day – here’s our album, eight songs; this is nine. And a lot longer than one would think, with no frills. No intro, no outro. No halftime commercial break or anything like that. Just, this is what we deliver, this is what you’re going to get. On release day, there’s no Amazon specials, or anything like that. This is the album; streamlined. And that was it when we began the writing. We tried to make the songs as catchy and memorable as possible, despite the fact they come from all different walks of extreme music. We’ve always been about… music is good no matter how the ingredients come together. You will find on this record – New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, twin guitar stuff, passed down to us by Thin Lizzy, by Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, etc. etc. And you will find black metal. You will find traces of death metal. But we don’t really build our albums like that. Like, ‘Oh my god, we need to put this in here.’ It’s just music to us. Those two new members have given us a little injection up the ass, I think.”
“White Hellebore” is the third single and video from The Screaming Of The Valkyries. For those who don’t know, a white hellebore is a poisonous winter-flowing Eurasian plant of the buttercup family. But it also features in Greek mythology. Dani reveals what led to him writing the lyrics to ‘White Hellebore’. “I needed another analogy. I wanted something that reflected someone I knew, someone that was close to me that had all these attributes. Hellebore was also profoundly used, allegedly, in witchcraft, and in possible poisonings. They reckon that maybe, Alexander The Great, when he fell ill, it was a suspected white hellebore poisoning. It’s a very magical, misunderstood, malignant plant. It’s also gifted as an emblem of hope because of the way it grows in the middle of winter. It’s literally one of the first flowers to survive the dark. So, it’s like a beacon of hope as well. It has many attributes, and I just found it fascinating, and a great metaphor.”
Cradle Of Filth’s touring in support of The Screaming Of The Valkyries is taking two very different approaches. First is North America, from April 17th to May 14th, as part of Chaos & Carnage 2025. COF is one of seven bands, playing alongside: Dying Fetus, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Ne Obliviscaris, Undeath, Vomit Forth, and Corpse Vile. That’s a mini-festival unto itself. Then in Europe and The UK, from June 6th to July 24th, Summoned In Summer is a much more traditional package with Cradle Of Filth headlining, and Nervosa opening. Dani elaborates upon these two totally opposite perspectives to touring.
“Well, we were offered this tour. I was actually in Brazil on holiday when we were offered it. It just seemed like quite a cool thing to co-headline a well-established tour. They said, ‘You’re going to be co-headlining. Do you want to flip-flop with them?’ I said, no, no, no, we’ll go on before them. A seven-band bill, it’ll benefit us more. I can be in a bubble bath when they hit the stage,” laughs Dani. “Sorry, I can’t take credit for that. That was a quote from David Coverdale from Whitesnake. And he was talking about playing with Def Leppard. Yeah, I’ll be in the back lounge of the bus. Anyhow, it keeps us grass roots, I think. Some of those other bands on the bill are fantastic as well. We’ve toured with Ne Obliviscaris, played festivals with Fleshgod – or Fresh Pot Of Chips, as I call them. We’re big fans of Dying Fetus, so I think it’s going to be cool. The Nervosa tour – love that band, love those girls. It kind of serves us as interim shows between big festivals like Download, and various other ones throughout the summer. So yeah, two different tours, but both are going to be really cool. Then the back half of the year, we’re going down to South America for a big tour. And there’s something at the end of the year, possibly 2026, cause the agents are fighting over it now. But something really, really big is going to come. Something that’s been on the cards for a while. It may surprise a few people. I can only leave it at that because I can’t jinx it.”
(Photo credit: Jakub Alexandrowicz)
Source: bravewords.com
