The Dreadful Hours is the 7th album by My Dying Bride, released on 13 November 2001. It contains a remake of "The Return of the Beautiful" (renamed "The Return to the Beautiful") from the band's debut album, As the Flower Withers. The Dreadful Hours was issued in a digipak with a full colour booklet.
My Dying Bride are an English doom metal band formed in Bradford. Since their inception in 1990, they have released thirteen full-length studio albums, three EPs, one demo, one box set, four compilation albums, one live album, and one live CD/DVD release. Along with Anathema and Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride were a forerunner of the death doom metal and gothic metal genres during the early 1990s. These bands comprise "The Peaceville Three" as all were signed to Peaceville Records at the time.