Midian

This is the album on which guitarist Paul Allender returned. It is also the first with drummer Adrian Erlandsson of At the Gates and The Haunted, and with keyboard player Martin Powell of My Dying Bride and Anathema. Doug Bradley, who played Lylesberg in the film Nightbreed and is better known as Pinhead from Hellraiser, narrates on several songs. The title and the subject come from Clive Barker's novel Cabal and his own film of it, Nightbreed. Dani Filth told Empire in 2012 that the record "kind of is and isn't a concept album: as a title, it just made perfect sense. The central song, 'Tortured Soul Asylum', is about Midian, and the characters in the rest made up a sort of collective from this mythical place where the monsters live." The sleeve is by the artist J. K. Potter and was later used again for his own 2002 horror anthology Embrace the Mutation. The album reached number 63 on the UK Albums Chart. Alex Chandon directed the video for "Her Ghost in the Fog", which got heavy rotation on MTV2, and the song turned up on the Ginger Snaps soundtrack the same year. Metal Hammer named the album one of the twenty best metal records of 2000. The running order here is the original's as printed.