Rough-Cut Diamonds

KING DIAMOND GUITARIST ANDY LAROCQUE ON 40 YEARS OF CREATING EXQUISITELY GHOULISH HORROR-METAL, HIS NEW SIGNATURE SHRED-MACHINE, NEW MUSIC AND MORE

- Gregory Adams

ONCE HE FINALLY opens it up to the public, King Diamond’s Saint Lucifer’s Hospital 1920 album is going to be insane.

It’s been a few years since the Danish occult-metal icon started talking up this much-anticipated project — which will be his eponymous band’s first full-length release since 2007's Give Me Your Soul... Please. The famously falsetto-flying frontman first teased its storyline around a supernatural asylum when he dropped the “Masquerade of Madness” single in 2019.

Though Saint Lucifer’s Hospital 1920 has been inching along in the background since then, the launching of King Diamond’s tour last fall showed great promise for the project when the group debuted two brand-new bangers at their opening date in San Antonio — “Spider Lilly,’ a phantasmagoric prog-metal slam propelled by a pinch-squealing walkdown riff from longtime guitarist Andy LaRocque, and a chugging creeper called “Electro Therapy.”

LaRocque says both songs are part of their developing concept record about “this place where you kind of end up between life and death,” an oddly prescient parallel to a record seemingly caught up in production purgatory. But when it came to “Spider Lilly,” which features neo-classically sculpted and shredded solos from LaRocque and co-guitarist Mike Wead (the latter also performing with the King in equally evil-sounding metal greats Mercyful Fate), the song actually came together quickly.

“King presented the idea of ‘Spider Lilly’ maybe a week before we left,” LaRocque says from an Atlanta tour stop, adding that the full band — which also features bassist Pontus Egberg and drummer Matt Thompson — cut the track between their respective home studios before hitting the road. The guitarist recently gave it a rough mix from his Sonic Train facility in Varberg, Sweden.