Ramon Martos Garcia of PureGrainAudio.com recently conducted an interview with guitarist Paul Allender of British extreme metallers CRADLE OF FILTH. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

PureGrainAudio.com: I know it's probably too soon to say, but in your opinion, how important do you think this new album ["The Manticore And Other Horrors"] will be for CRADLE OF FILTH's career?

Paul: I think it will be really important. It got an injection of groove, and there's a punk aspect that we put back into it that the band had lost since the first album, "Principle Of Evil Made Flesh". That album had that vibe. It had that real aggressive, metal-punky vibe to it, which the band completely lost. And over the last few albums, it just felt like the stuff we were writing sounded the same. So this time we had to do something more drastic. There's nothing worse than a band that keeps releasing albums that sound exactly the same over and over again. We have got such a really good feedback so far. The journalists that have heard it so far are really into it. Especially in Europe, there is a whole bunch of journalists that said this is the best thing we have ever done for the last 12 years, which is brilliant. And we had a lot of people coming to say to us as well: "We kind of lost interest for band on the last few albums, but this one puts you back in the game finally." So I think it's really important.

PureGrainAudio.com: One more time, you're collaborating with producer/engineer Scott Atkins. But this is the first he produced the whole album. What is so special about him?

Paul: Scott actually produced the whole album. On the last album, he recorded just the guitars. And after that, he actually said to us, "You know, I got this brilliant idea if you please let me produce the whole album. Please let me have a go. I got some cool ideas especially for guitars about this and about that... I'll visualize what the band's missing. The last few albums were good but you're not getting the reviews that I personally think the band deserves." I think he has done an excellent job; the fucking guitars are raging! His ideas made this album different. It's just goes around somewhere we probably would have never gone without that push. He has done a really good job. He's got amazing ideas in the studio.

PureGrainAudio.com: So, sound-wise, are you pretty satisfied about how it came out?

Paul: Absolutely! It's the best thing in a long time, I love it. It's so clear. It's what a lot of bands strive for, recording an album that's clear. And it's not overproduced either. It's just nice to have an album where the guitars are absolutely raging and you can hear absolutely everything. We've never really had that before on an album. But this time you can actually hear everything and that's brilliant and that's a really step forward for the band.

Read the entire interview from PureGrainAudio.com.