Cradle of Filth are back with another skin-crawling music video to support their forthcoming The Screaming of the Valkyries. And continuing the UK extreme-metal outfit’s neverending quest to give you the ick, they have unveiled a new video — apparently storyboarded off the idea of “erotic autopsy” — for the album’s “White Hellebore.”
The latest COF offering follows last month’s profanely horny, possession-style video for “To Live Deliciously.” While the presentation of the visuals are somewhat less goopy this time around, it gets off to an uncomfortable start right quick, as a dead Hollywood starlet is wheeled into a morgue and put under the ogling care of a creeper mortician.
Without spoiling too much, there are some silver screen flashbacks to behold, while the worker studies the occult-ish markings of the woman’s body a little too ravenously before undressing himself. Skin gets yanked. Things get gory.
Dani Filth further teases the vid as “a necromantic mystic tryst that an overzealous morgue attendant encounters with terrifying results.”
The song, meanwhile, ratchets up the intensity from the jump through a series of black-metal trillings and hyper-fast scissor beats, though the chorus sports a glumly operatic melodicism.
Lyrically, Dani Filth shrieks through a lovelorn scenario where someone has apparently fallen for the “fatal perfection” of another. The vocalist added in a statement that the floral origin of the song title “reminds us scintillatingly of our own mortality.”
“In context of this song, the ‘White Hellebore’ of the title is an alluring woman not too distant in danger from the predatory black widow, fostering both hope and despair,” Filth explained, adding that the character is “A poison and an elixir…stunning to behold but ever deadly to taste.”
As previously reported, The Screaming of the Valkyries hits stores and streamers March 21st via Napalm Records. The collection is said to harken back to Cradle classics Midian and Dusk… and Her Embrace albums. Not for nothing, there’s a section in “White Hellebore” where Filth screams of a “returning dusk.”
Cradle of Filth are also all set to co-headline the upcoming Chaos & Carnage tour with Dying Fetus. You’ll find the joint tour schedule here.