The band consists of its founding member, vocalist Dani Filth, drummer Martin "Marthus" Škaroupka, bassist Daniel Firth, guitarists Marek "Ashok" Šmerda and Donny Burbage, and keyboardist Zoe Marie Federoff.

[2] Cradle of Filth's first three years saw three demos (Invoking the Unclean, Orgiastic Pleasures Foul and Total Fucking Darkness) recorded amidst the sort of rapid line-up fluctuations that have continued ever since, with the band having more than thirty musicians in its history.

A step-up in terms of production from the rehearsal quality of most of their demos, the album was still nevertheless a sparse and embryonic version of what was to come, with lead singer Dani Filth's vocals in particular bearing little similarity to the style he was later to develop.

Acrimonious legal proceedings took up most of 1995,[6] and the original version of the band's second album, Dusk... and Her Embrace was recorded by the Principle... lineup for Cacophonous but scrapped.

Subsequently re-worked with new band members for Music For Nations (see below), the embryonic Cacophonous version was eventually released as Dusk... and Her Embrace: The Original Sin in July 2016.

[6] Despite the circumstances of its release however, its handful of tracks are staples of the band's live sets to this day, and "Queen of Winter, Throned" was listed among twenty-five "essential extreme metal anthems" in a 2006 issue of Kerrang!

The EP also marked Sarah Jezebel Deva's debut with the band, replacing Andrea Meyer, Cradle's first female vocalist and self-styled "satanic advisor".

The re-worked and re-recorded Dusk... and Her Embrace followed the same year: a critically acclaimed breakthrough album that greatly expanded the band's fan-base throughout Europe and the rest of the world.

The increasingly theatrical stage shows of the 1997 European tour helped keep Cradle in the public eye, as did a burgeoning line of controversial merchandise, not least the notorious T-shirt depicting a masturbating nun on the front and the slogan "Jesus is a cunt" in large letters on the back.

In 1998, Filth began his long-running "Dani's Inferno" column for Metal Hammer, and the band appeared in the BBC documentary series Living with the Enemy (on tour with a fan and his disapproving mother and sister)[11] and released its third studio album, Cruelty and the Beast.

[14] Like Cruelty and the Beast, Midian featured a guest narrator, this time Doug Bradley, who starred in Nightbreed but remains best known for playing Pinhead in the Hellraiser series.

Finally, the band (principally Dani) also found time to appear in the horror film Cradle of Fear while they negotiated their first major-label signing with Sony Music.

Everything in the band is a democracy decision.. Dani has just been painted black in the press...To be honest, to find six people who think along the same lines and share the same interests and like have everything else sort of on a similar level.

Damnation and a Day arrived in 2003; Sony's heavyweight funding underwriting Cradle's undiminished ambition[18] by finally bringing a real orchestra into the studio (the 101 piece Budapest Film Orchestra including the 40 piece Choir replacing the increasingly sophisticated synthesisers of previous albums) and thus marking the band's belated gestation—for one album only—into full-blown symphonic metal.

Damnation featured the band's most complex compositions to date, outran its predecessors by a good twenty minutes and produced two more popular videos: the Jan Švankmajer-influenced Mannequin and Babalon A.D. (So Glad for the Madness), based on Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Salò.

Roughly half the album trod the conceptual territory of John Milton's Paradise Lost—showing the events of the fall of man through the eyes of Lucifer[12]—while the remainder comprised stand-alone tracks such as the Nile tribute "Doberman Pharaoh"[13] and the aforementioned "Babalon A. D."; a reference to Aleister Crowley.

Cradle's bass guitarist Dave Pybus described it as an "eclectic mix between the group's Damnation and Cruelty albums with a renewed vigour for melody, songmanship [sic] and plain fucking weirdness.

89 on the Billboard Top 200 chart, selling just under 14,000 copies,[21] and the band's growing acceptance by the mainstream was confirmed when the album's title track was nominated for a Grammy award.

[19] Thornography received a similar reception to Nymphetamine, garnering generally positive reviews, but raising a few eyebrows with the inclusion of a cover of Heaven 17's "Temptation"[25][26][27] (featuring guest vocals from Dirty Harry), which was released as a digital single and accompanying video shortly before the album.

Work on the eighth studio album, released in October 2008 as Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder, began early that year following a GWAR-supported tour which took place in Russia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Romania, Slovakia and North America.

[30] Godspeed is a concept album based around the legend of Gilles de Rais, a 15th-century French nobleman who fought alongside Joan of Arc and accumulated great wealth before becoming an occultist, sexual deviant and murderer.

[37][39] Released on 1 November 2010, it is a concept album in the same vein as its predecessor, Godspeed on the Devil's Thunder; this time centring on the demon Lilith, the first wife of the biblical Adam,[36] and also making reference to Greek, Egyptian and Sumerian mythology, the Knights Templar and the Carmelite Nuns.

[47] In April 2014, Paul Allender stated on his official Facebook account that he had once again left Cradle of Filth, in favour of his new band White Empress.

[48] Dani Filth stated about Allender departing the band: "Paul has been enthralled [sic] in his own project and he could not do the tour due to personal reasons.

[51] Both guitarists were replaced for upcoming tours by Marek "Ashok" Šmerda of the Czech groups Root and Inner Fear, and Richard Shaw of English acts Emperor Chung and NG26.

The shoot was in the hangar and fire station of former U.S. military base of Bentwaters,[59] with additional narrative scenes (featuring actresses in a bondage setting) filmed on a farmstead near the Imperial War Museum Duxford.

[60] On 21 April 2015, the album's release date was updated to sometime in July, and the band revealed Hammer of the Witches' cover artwork by the Latvian post-modernist artist Arthur Berzinsh.

On 16 June 2017 the title of their twelfth studio album was revealed as Cryptoriana – The Seductiveness of Decay and it was given an official release date of 22 September 2017 through Nuclear Blast Records.

[88] Despite these classifications, Cradle of Filth's particular genre has provoked a great deal of discussion,[96] and their status as a black metal band or otherwise has been in debate since near the time that the group rose to fame.

They have collaborated on projects such as Christian Death's Born Again Anti-Christian album (on the track "Peek-a-Boo") and have even experimented outside of metal music with dance remixes – such as "Twisting Further Nails", "Pervert's Church" and "Forgive Me Father (I'm in a Trance)".