Dani Filth — born in England in 1973 — is the vocalist, lyricist and only permanent member of Cradle of Filth since the band's founding in 1991 in Suffolk. His voice is one of the most recognisable timbres in extreme metal: a shrill, almost shrieking high register, alternated with low growls and spoken passages. It is a device that comes neither from Norwegian black metal nor from death metal — Filth built a register of his own, theatrical, closer to horror narration than to a conventional vocal of the genre. As a lyricist, he is the author of all the repertoire's content, and there lies Cradle of Filth's central difference. While black metal dealt with anti-Christianity and Nordic landscape, Filth wrote about Elizabeth Báthory (Cruelty and the Beast, 1998), Gilles de Rais (Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder, 2008) and Clive Barker's mythology (Midian, 2000), with a vocabulary drawn from Victorian gothic literature. It is extreme metal with explicit literary reference, not scene posture. That combination brought the band a visibility rare for the genre: Cradle of Filth reached the British charts, was nominated for a Grammy for Nymphetamine (2004) and became the best-known name in extreme metal outside it — a standing that earned it both a mass audience and rejection within the underground itself.
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