Midian

Hot Topic heroes Cradle of Filth shocked normies with their blasphemous imagery, but perhaps their most blasphemous crime to black metal purists was that they could pen some vicious pop hooks as well. Nowhere did they do it better than on their fourth album, Midian, based on Clive Barker’s Cabal (aka Nightbreed). Those hooks are buried under layers of keyboards and Dani Filth’s ear-piercing shrieks, but “Cthulhu Dawn” and the Gothic romance “Her Ghost in the Fog” provide chilling proof that “selling out” only improved the genre.