THE STORY BEHIND
The gothic ode to love, lust and addiction that sparked commercial success and a Grammy nomination
BY THE TIME they released their sixth studio album, 2004’s Nymphetamine, Cradle Of Filth were loved and loathed in equal measure.
Having partially shed their black metal skins, they’d embraced a more grandiose and symphonic style, dragging extreme metal as close to the mainstream as it could get at that point. They’d even – gasp! – signed to a major label for preceding album Damnation And A Day, which came out on Sony in 2003.
Nymphetamine the record featured two versions of its title track.
Nymphetamine (Overdose) was a multipart, nine-minute epic sitting as the centrepiece of the record. But it was a shortened version, dubbed Nymphetamine (Fix), that was sent forth as a single, taking on its own life, propelling the band to even greater levels of infamy and landing them their biggest-selling album to this day. It even got nominated for a Grammy.
“The negativity had already hit us in a tsunami by that point,” laughs frontman Dani Filth. “When we signed with Sony, of course we were labelled sellouts. We were the Backstreet Boys! But the thing about being in a band with longevity is that you eventually outrun all that crap anyway.”
Cradle’s relationship with Sony lasted for a single album, with Nymphetamine emerging on Roadrunner just a year after Damnation And A Day. When asked if they were in a hurry to get something out on their new label, Dani “We were fuelled up at this time. We’d headlined the B-stage of the American Ozzfest for 10 weeks, which was a big, big deal,” he recalls. “We took Type O Negative out in support of us in the Statesand I think some of that Type O rubbed off on us a little bit with some of the songwriting. Sony didn’t really understand us, and they let us go without holding us to any contract, with Roadrunner waiting in the wings. We were riding high as a band, and that’s why we were so swiftly off the bat.”
Following a string of full- and partial-concept albums, the band wanted to return to a more varied approach on Nymphetamine. This coincided with a change in the songwriting process, with former keyboard player Martin Powell telling blog Jävla Musik that they went from “writing as a full band in the rehearsal room, to each of us working on our own songs on our own studio set-ups”.
He also claimed that he wrote a few songs in their entirety, along with “the majority” of the title track.
“What I remember is that we wr
