"This album is about existential terror," Dani Filth declared with the announcement of Existence Is Futile. "The threat of everything. The end of the world, the end of one's life, existential dread."
If there were to be a band to serenade the very end of all things, you could do a lot worse than Cradle Of Filth. There are few who would enjoy the apocalyptic backdrop more. Made during, although not about COVID (just "the tip of the cotton-bud" of our problems, reckons Dani), Existence Is Futile presents Armageddon with cinematic grandeur, a ginormous, Baroque vision of the end played out in glorious, Biblical proportions. There is war, there is death. There is human extinction heading out in Bela Lugosi's black gown, as well as a warning about how "The ability to sustain life on Earth is shrinking", delivered in BBC English that could be called 'sobering' were it not arriving in the midst of a celebration so exhilarating as this. Or, indeed, didn't sum up its cheerful state of the existence address by noting that if we don't change our ways, nature will do it for us, "and she will be fucking brutal."
Often derided as the court jesters of black metal, here Cradle Of Filth are in their element as ringmasters of a terminal, macabre circus. And since it's happening right now, it's only logical that the band should rediscover such a diabolic form as this.