David E. Gehlke of Blistering.com recently conducted an interview with CRADLE OF FILTH frontman DANI FILTH. A few exercepts from the chat follow:

Blistering.com: First impressions of "Godspeed On the Devil's Thunder" is that it's possibly the most brutal and unrelenting CRADLE album to date.

Dani Filth: Absolutely. The thing I've been trying to explain is that it's the most extreme, but it's possibly the most melodic. Even though I'm screaming throughout the whole thing, musically, it's got this symphonic, grandiose [feeling], but brutal as fuck.

Blistering.com: Paul's (Allender, guitars) writing style has come to define the modern CRADLE OF FILTH sound. How's the working relationship between the two of you?

Filth: Paul's the core writer. You'll be surprised to know that the back of the album — the artwork you're going to love. It's the best artwork we've ever had. It's very deranged and symbolic. Imagine CATHEDRAL's and the artwork we're famous for. It's really, really cool. On the back cover, there are four of us. There's only four people on this record. The keyboardist (Rosie Smith) is a live member since she has her own career. Charles (Hedger, live guitars) has his own band now, so we wrote as four-piece: drums, bass, and an outside keyboardist who we call "Captain Keyboardist" who we've worked before and is fucking awesome and obviously, me and Paul. We're slightly stripped down, but it doesn't sound like it.

Blistering.com: What's the touring schedule shaping up to be?

Filth: December 1st is the beginning of our festival called "The Darkest Tour". It's us, GORGOROTH, MOONSPELL, SEPTICFLESH, and another band. The American tour is going to be seven to eight weeks. I think it starts around the 7th or 9th of January and it's us, SATYRICON and SEPTICFLESH. As a band, we've done, in our opinion our ultimate record. Everything that everybody thinks about CRADLE OF FILTH or thinks CRADLE OF FILTH should be is on this record: the lyrics, the artworks, and more importantly, the music. Because of that, we didn't want to shy away from anything. The ultimate thing we could do on this tour is a tour with DIMMU [BORGIR]. We've got GORGOROTH, SATYRICON, MOONSPELL…we're trying to get MAYHEM to come on the road with us because this American tour is going to be the first of many.

Blistering.com: What, a possible CRADLE/DIMMU co-headlining tour?

Filth: You got to be joking, co-headlining? We'll be the ones who'll be headlining. We're going to try to combine the essence and ideologies behind this Gilles de Rais thing because obviously, we're not going to be able to play the whole album. We're going to bring the stage show we usually have in Europe, not the same one, but one that's close. We have a new designer on board, so we're going to have a great light show as well as static stage production. America hasn't even seen Edwina Filth, which is our 13-foot long animated puppet. We've always had to ship her and she doesn't like long journeys. We want to bring a big stage show this time; we want when we come out for it to be an event and we want fucking great bands to play with us. We want to be upstaged because it will make us play better ourselves.

Read the entire interview at www.blistering.com.