Few metal singers immediately powered their way into the heavy-metal hall of fame quite like King Diamond.
From Mercyful Fate’s black-magick-incanting “Corpse Without a Soul” to his most recent horror-howling “Spider Lilly” solo single, the Danish metal royal has commanded our attention through Satan-summoning performances, demonic grunting and a glass-shattering falsetto that’s part Maria Callas, part Rob Halford and completely jaw-dropping.
Through it all, the King has also captured our attention with his gothic performance style, whether singing into a bony crucifix and cavorting near coffins onstage, or donning various iterations of his upside-down-cross-employing corpsepaint.
Through five decades of activity, the King’s voice has never wavered in its intensity — but what pray tell is his most chilling performance? The one that makes you want to pledge an oath to the King Diamond fan club for life. The one that keeps you up at night thinking about its sheer awesomeness?
We asked Revolver readers to crown the best song across both Mercyful Fate and King Diamond’s catalogs, and they came to the Sabbath with this infernal top 5.
“A Mansion in Darkness”
While “A Mansion in Darkness” is a thunderous ripper, thematically it’s the eerie calm before the storm on King Diamond’s Abigail. The concept record’s third song finds protagonists Miriam Natias and Jonathan La’Fey trying to unwind after the long journey to their new home, a dusty and rat-filled mansion “where evil rules at night.”
It makes for a macabre bedtime story, King Diamond diming his uniquely ominous and operatic vocal range above the 5000-horsepower battering of his band. While the couple try their best to grab a snooze, the master metal storyteller notes that there’s a suspicious shadow keeping watch within the haunted compound.
As fans of the King’s most famous ghost story well know, things do not bode well for the pair.
“Come to the Sabbath”
Mercyful Fate closed up the rituals of their first act with Don’t Break the Oath’s thrillingly satanic “Come to the Sabbath,” wherein King Diamond croons and growls above the progressive occult-metal hellfire of his bandmates like a man possessed.
The King acts like a kind of fiendish Toucan Sam figure while beckoning us to follow our noses towards the scent of brimstone and a pair of candles burning at the altar down by the ruined bridge.
Many metal fans have heeded King’s call since Fate unleashed “Come to the Sabbath” in the early Eighties. Whether or not they pledged an eternal, unbreakable oath to the Devil remains to be determined, but fans have certainly hailed another dark lord for the past 40 years: King Diamond himself.
“Welcome Home”
*taps microphone*: “GRRRAAAAANNNDMAAAAAAA!”
“Abigail”
“I am alive, inside your wife.”
1987’s Abigail set the bar high with its bone-chilling, phantasmagoric body-horror storytelling, and indeed, that’s partly why fans ran up the numbers with praise for King Diamond’s sophomore solo album and its penultimate title track.
“Abigail,” the song, is where everything comes to a head. A sleek, sinister groove and neoclassical soloing underscore King’s creepiness on the cut, as he embodies the spirit of the titular ghostchild fully taking over Miriam.
The vocalist unfurls memorably scarifying harmonized “Ahhs,” drops in a fully unsettling round of laughter, and bounces between multiple characters before teeing up the album’s fateful finale.
“Sleepless Nights”
When Revolver spoke with the King in 2019, he described how bad dreams had been haunting him for years, each slumberscape offering a new terrifying journey through his own death-and-doom-obsessed subconscious. That all seemed to track, considering we already knew by this point that he’d faced his fair share of sleepless nights.
This dread-galloped Conspiracy classic features a dynamic, eternally-damned performance from King Diamond. He offers a sad, sorrowful falsetto to the clean-picked verses, but then brings the devil’s dissonance to the chorus while smash-layering together uncomplimentary, but bone-chilling B and F notes.
As with many others, he soars through this one with his signature, psyche-damaged howl. For generations of King Diamond fans, it’s a sound that’s kept them up at night as they studied and savored every note.