Thirteen studio albums into its existence and four years after Cryptoriana, the old gothic institution called Cradle of Filth walked into Grindstone Studios in Suffolk in February 2020 with Scott Atkins behind the desk, walked out in October with a record built while the rest of the world was being shut indoors, and on 22 October 2021 released Existence Is Futile through Nuclear Blast. Finland took it to number 4, Germany to number 9, the UK Rock and Metal chart to number 3. This is the old opera house, set ablaze, and it plays louder than it has in years. It kicks in the doors of a locked-down world.
The six-piece that made it was a line-up caught in a moment of passage, and the record carries the marks of that. Marthus Škaroupka plays drums and builds the orchestration, Daniel Firth holds the bass, Richard Shaw and Ashok Šmerda divide the guitars, and Anabelle Iratni plays keyboards and sings the female parts, on what became her only album with the band, since she and Shaw left in May 2022. The sessions themselves were a siege conducted at half speed: the drums were finished before lockdown, Šmerda reached the studio five months after Škaroupka, the vocals went down before the bass, and the working days were cut in half, against a normal studio day that, as Dani Filth told HeavyMetal.dk in an interview reported on 17 January 2022, means "you literally work 14, 16 hours a day." He was equally plain about the calendar in that interview: "The album was written before the pandemic."
What changed is the subject. For most of its history the band wrote from inside gothic and occult myth, crypts and vampire courts and the long catalogue of the damned; here the dread is planetary, the ecology and the wars of the actual world set down in the same purple ink once reserved for the undead. The result is a gilded opera house whose chandeliers have been shot out of the ceiling and replaced with satellite pictures of the fires, while the orchestra in the pit keeps playing as if the curtain were not already alight. Dani Filth called the title "one of the most nihilistic and negative titles you could probably come up with" to Tuonela Magazine on 19 November 2021. The sleeve agrees with him. Arthur Berzinsh painted it after the Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, a catalogue of damnation five centuries old, updated for the age of carbon.
This is the old opera house, set ablaze, and it plays louder than it has in years.
After the instrumental prelude, "Existential Terror" comes in with a battering ram, blast beats and orchestra thrown into the same assault, the choirs stacked behind the guitars like a chorus line that has been told the theatre is on fire and has decided to sing louder. Then the record shows its other face. "Necromantic Fantasies", the second single, released on 15 September 2021, carries the long shadow of the Nymphetamine years, and it is where Iratni's voice takes up the role the female counter-voice played in the era of Midian and Nymphetamine, seduction laid over the slaughter.
"Crawling King Chaos" does the dirty work. Sent out as the first single on 30 July 2021, it is the fastest and heaviest track on the record, the band at full extremity, an assault in which the drums run flat out and the orchestra is dragged along behind like siege artillery hauled through winter mud, still firing. It also invites an argument: is it the purest violence on the album, or brute mass after the seduction of the song before it? "Crawling King Chaos" wins on weight and gives up a measure of allure, and the weight is worth the trade. A band thirteen records deep owes nobody this much ferocity, and it pays it out anyway.
The traditional metal running under the black metal is the record's concealed weapon. "Black Smoke Curling from the Lips of War" sets Dani Filth against Iratni in a duet and lets the guitars loose in harmony leads lifted straight from the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and "How Many Tears to Nurture a Rose?" rides an Iron Maiden gallop through the middle of an extreme metal album without a trace of embarrassment, Maiden and Priest forged into the same alloy as the orchestra and the blasts. It should not hold together. It holds.
"Discourse Between a Man and His Soul" slows to the pace of a near ballad, the record's one long exhale, and earns its place through restraint rather than mass. "Suffer Our Dominion" is the final monologue from the stage: the actor Doug Bradley narrates over a requiem for a planet stripped and burned, and the ecological dread the lyrics have circled all album finally speaks in a voice built for pronouncing sentence, before "Us, Dark, Invincible" closes the doors.
The limit is the same thing as the strength. Nothing here is new. Every weapon on Existence Is Futile was forged on earlier records, the choirs, the gallops, the female counter-voice, the shriek climbing over the strings, and the album hangs on exactly this point: it is either a band rediscovering its own fire or a band going nowhere new with better production and a bigger choir. The first is the honest description, because the songs carry their weight without leaning on the band's past, but the second is not wrong about the map. This is a renaissance, not a reinvention, and the distinction costs it the top of the scale.
For anyone who drifted away from the band somewhere after Nymphetamine, this is the record that justifies the return; for anyone who never had patience for the theatre, it will change nothing, and it does not try to. Ignoring it means missing the hour in which a thirteen-album institution set its own opera house ablaze with the world burning outside the doors, and sang the old arias with more conviction than it had found in years.