CRADLE OF FILTH: 'Thornography' Pushed Back to October; Track Listing Revealed

British extreme metallers CRADLE OF FILTH have finalized the track listing for their new album, "Thornography", due on October 16 via Roadrunner Records. The follow-up to 2004's "Nymphetamine", "Thornography" was recorded at Lincolnshire, England's Chapel studios with producer Rob Caggiano (BLEEDING THROUGH, ANTHRAX) and was mixed at Backstage Studios in Derbyshire, England by Andy Sneap (MACHINE HEAD, SKINLAB, NEVERMORE).

"Thornography" (view cover artwork at this location) track listing:

01. Under Pregnant Skies She Comes Alive Like Miss Leviathan
02. Dirge Inferno
03. Tonight in Flames
04. Libertina Grimm
05. Byronic Man
06. I Am The Thorn
07. Cemetery And Sundown
08. Lovesick For Mina
09. The Foetus Of A New Day Kicking
10. Rise Of The Pentagram
11. Under Huntress Moon
12. Temptation

The narraration for "Thornography" was once again laid down by Doug Bradley (a.k.a. "Hellraiser"'s chief Cenobite, Pinhead),who has previously worked with the group on "Her Ghost in the Fog" and "Swansong for a Raven".

On the subject of the album's musicial direction, CRADLE OF FILTH guitarist Paul Allender recently told Terrorizer magazine, "There are quite a few guitar solos on this album. To be honest, I've never really classed myself as a lead player as such, but this is the first time I've sat down and seriously practiced lead work. I've been so involved in actually writing new material and coming up with song structures that I haven't had time to practice all the frilly things that go on top of it. Up 'till now, there hasn't really been much room for guitar solos as such. The riffs we write, they're not riffs that are meant to be soloed on top of. They're melodic within themselves. But I'm a great believer than less is definitely more. I love listening to all the shreddy, widdly stuff, but I have no interest in playing it. This new album is quite guitar-orientated. The last album was, but this is definitely more melodic. Dare I say it, there are quite a lot of typical MAIDEN-esque harmonies in there."

On the idea that the band now have almost nothing in common with traditional balck metal, Allender told Terrorizer, "Everyone's gonna hate me for saying this, but I didn't think we had in the first place. The only thing that catered to that was the make-up. That's it. People say, 'Blah blah, sellouts, not true black metal,' but we were never a black metal band in the first place. Even when 'The Principle of Evil Made Flesh' [1994] came out — you look at EMPEROR and BURZUM and all that stuff — we didn't sound nothing like that. The way that I see it is that we were, and still are now, an extreme heavy metal band."

CRADLE OF FILTH is tentatively scheduled to hit the road in Europe before the end of the year, with U.S. dates planned for after Christmas.