King Diamond is releasing an epic DVD set featuring Graspop and Fillmore full sets of Abigail. This release looks seriously sick. As a die hard King fan I am beyond elated today and singing in falsetto and pissing off my dramatic cat.
“Songs For The Dead Live gives those who missed out on seeing these shows in the flesh a chance to vividly experience them, offering so much deeper an experience than your run of the mill live DVD.”
More BELOW.
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On May 18th, King Diamond will release LP re-issues of the classic albums Abigail, Fatal Portrait, and Them via Metal Blade Records. Available as 180g picture discs, these exclusive editions can be purchased now at: http://www.metalblade.com/kingdiamond
“You can spiral yourself into darkness with these classic King Diamond albums, or you can exhibit them on your wall like I will. Either way, enjoy.” – King Diamond
See below for the albums’ track-listings, and stay tuned for more King Diamond re-issues coming soon!
Track listing BELOW.
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More info BELOW.
Abigail has long been my absolute favorite King release, though many prefer Them. I’m happy the King’s finest, IMO, hour is getting the US full tour treatment! Read my recent interview with the legend himself HERE about his near death experience and how he hates saxophones, then check dates out below. Mayhem Fest might be gone, but they went out with the coolest band to ever grace their tour (besides another Mickey Dee alumni band, Motorhead). Yes, the black horseman ride again and that jerk Jonathan is gonna have kind of a hard time.
Official statement:
King Diamond will be back on tour soon for an extra special event for fans – one not to be missed! As part of the set, the band will be performing the classic 1987 album Abigail in its entirety! The tour will begin on October 29th and runs through December 5th with legendary bay area thrash metal band Exodus as the opening act! The full list of confirmed dates is below. The general on sale for tickets begins Friday, August 7th at 10am ET.
dates BELOW.
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Shining‘s IX: Everyone, Everything, Everywhere, Ends is upon us and it’s prime time for scaredy cats out there to bust out their “The End Is Nigh” placards. Niklas Kvarforth discusses the creation, cultivation and concerns behind the 6 new tracks BELOW.
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SLAYER, King Diamond, HELLYEAH, The Devil Wears Prada, Whitechapel, Thy Art Is Murder, Jungle Rot, Sister Sin, Sworn In, Shattered Sun, Feed Her To The Sharks, Code Orange and Kissing Candice have all been announced for Mayhem. While there is no band as mainstream as last years headliners Avenged Sevenfold on here this year, the main stage has a lot to offer.
Tickets are On Sale Beginning Friday April 17, 2015 at 10:00am Local Time
General Admission Festival and Lawn Tickets are only $19.99 including all fees for the first 72 Hours of Onsale (while supplies last). Not bad for 13 bands performing on the ROCKSTAR ENERGY DRINK MAIN STAGE and the VICTORY RECORDS STAGE. I’d pay that to see just Sister Sin’s wild and razor edged rock show alone.
The main stage will feature five-time-nominated, two-time Grammy winning thrashers Slayer as headliner, as well as additional performances from King Diamond, HELLYEAH, and The Devil Wears Prada. The VICTORY RECORDS STAGE will feature headliner Whitechapel as well as Thy Art Is Murder, Jungle Rot, Sister Sin, Sworn In, Shattered Sun, Feed Her To The Sharks, Code Orange and Kissing Candice. Nice to see Code Orange on this tour as they will give even the main stage acts a run for their money. And I can’t wait for Jungle Rot to hammer down some real death metal on the unsuspecting.
Kerry King, guitarist of ROCKSTAR ENERGY DRINK MAIN STAGE headliners Slayer states, “I don’t know if third time will be a charm, but it will definitely be hellish! Slayer and King Diamond on stage for the first time together in the States- NEVER has Mayhem been more evil. DON’T FUCKIN’ MISS IT.”
For more see BELOW.
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New King Diamond collection to announce, this news hot on the heels of our recent interview.
A 2xCD collection of King Diamond songs, newly enhanced into ultimate editions by King Diamond and Andy LaRocque themselves, will be released by Metal Blade Records next month!
King Diamond‘s “Dreams of Horror” is the only “best of” album covering the band’s entire career. King Diamond and Andy LaRocque meticulously mastered and enhanced these 23 songs into the ultimate editions, chosen by the band from both the Roadrunner and Metal Blade catalogs.
“Dreams of Horror” will be available on November 11th. Listen to “The Puppet Master” from disc 2 of “Dreams of Horror” and pre-order a copy now at metalblade.com/kingdiamond.
In other news, King Diamond vinyl has been made available throughout 2014. Currently, vinyl versions of Them, Abigail, The Eye, Fatal Portrait, and The Puppet Master are available now on the Metal Blade webshop. Conspiracy and In Concert will be coming this January! Copies of the vinyl are available now HERE.
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“I might have to bring Grandma back some day. I use her a lot on stage. Not just during “Welcome Home”. She stays around and we do something horrible to her (laughing). You’ll experience that. It’s almost like going back to the Inquisition. For a few minutes I feel like that. It’s all in good spirits, y’know, but it feels like the whole crowd WANTS something bad to happen.” – King Diamond
When you hear the phrase “Hail to the King” some people think of Elvis. Others think of Bruce Campbell’s character Ash from the Evil Dead films. Mall kids think of Avenged Sevenfold. But for old school metal heads there is only one king…King fucking Diamond.
Pop culture has occasional moments of shadowed fringe brilliance like the horror/fantasy comic The Lords Of Misrule (which also has an evil old Granny w tea cups full of blood, perhaps not incidentally). True Blood was mainstream but sometimes had some inspired Nocturnal Poisoning’s Doomgrass album finds Xasthur experimenting with a compelling mix of poverty ghost blues and watery darkness. 1349 are named after the year the black plague came to Norway, so that is pretty darn metal. But only King Diamond has truly married high concept horror of both the low brow and literary minded historical varieties to classic metal sounds for decades with such consistent vision, death defying vocal heights and an all encompassing approach that goes beyond shock rock tactics.
Now King Diamond is back from near death with a North American tour (including Fun Fun Fun Fest) and a new lease on life. It was an honor to speak with, in my opinion, the greatest living metal singer about his recent years, career highlights and how it feels to do nasty things to his characters.
Abandon all hope and enter HERE to read more.
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“I am aliiiiiive inside your wife”!!! King Diamond is the greatest vocalist left now that Dio is gone, and the King will once again finally set his bone mic stand down on these darkened shores. I saw him years ago at BB King’s in NYC with Nile and it is to this day one of my fondest and creepiest concert memories. Here’s hoping he plays some of the awesome Give Me Your Soul…Please cuts amongst classic material like “Tea” and “Abigail”.
The long-awaited trek will commence on October 11th in Atlanta and wrap up with the previously announced performance at Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin. A limited edition KING DIAMOND jacket will be available through the SHOWstubs.com fan club presale, which begins tomorrow, June 24th. Tickets will be on sale online and at box offices nationwide on Friday, June 27th.
KING DIAMOND will be joined on stage by longtime band members Andy LaRocque (who writes the greatest guitar solos in all of metal), Mike Wead, Hal Patino, and Matt Thompson. Additionally, North American fans will bear witness to the band’s full European festival stage show!. These will be the most ambitious and largest North American productions of the band’s entire history. A special guest support act for the tour will be announced in the coming weeks. Everyone is expecting it is Judas Priest but I’m not so sure they’d want to play second fiddle here, Halford being a metal god and also pretty much tied for first place with King as the greatest, haha.
Click HERE for tour dates! I’m going back to the couch to watch Penny Dreadful now and get stoked when they show a tea cup full of blood in the opening credits. Graaaaandma!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And Click HERE to see a recent entry in our Deep Cuts series (exploring lesser known tracks from great bands) on King as well!!!
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Billy Riker of the fantastic progressive band Three (very old friends of mine who I respect and love a lot) helped me with this one and chose a song! Thanks for being my first assistant on a “Deep Cuts” piece, Billy! Yeaaaahhhhhhhhh! Billy is himself a sick shred master.
Speaking of guitar…we also had to cover King because guitarist Andy LaRocque consistently drops some of, if not THE, best solos in heavy metal. Metal Blade has recently really amped up their King Diamond merch promotion online and it is overdue! Shit, I almost seriously tried to write a book about the album ABIGAIL once! King is the best.
King has brought so much awe, headbanging and joy into my life. Seeing him live for the first time I will always remember screaming “18 is 9”!!!!! I have never screamed along with such manic insanity to another artist (even Danzig or Dio) and with the exception of maybe “Mr. Freeze” Arnold one-liners, nothing ever makes me laugh as much as King’s crazy ideas either.
I used to work at a fabric wholesale shop with my friend Ryan who now is on the show ODDITIES. We would listen to KD (not Lang, though she is also metal) as much as possible and laugh our heads off and fuck up expensive orders because we were too busy being psyched.
Anyway, fire up your Corvette, pet a black cat and click HERE to read this rad article!!!
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The King Diamond band just announced that they have signed a new three-album worldwide deal with Metal Blade Records, which released all their albums from 1995’s The Spider’s Lullabye to 2007’s Give Me Your Soul…Please in the United States. The band’s vocalist and namesake comments:
“This is gonna be awesome! Another perfect piece of the puzzle. We have the full backup of Metal Blade, and there’s an understanding between us that goes much, much deeper than before.
Our new business setup will noticeably benefit the fans in so many ways. You must have already noticed some of all the cool new stuff that is happening. Now we can’t wait to get out there and start touring again!”
The King Diamond band is currently writing a new album, which is supposedly due out next year and will be their first since 2007’s Give Me Your Soul…Please.
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So apparently there is this Swedish scientist who keeps discovering new types of fossils (worms for the most part) and naming them after metal legends. Six years ago he named one after Lemmy from Motörhead, and now he’s going for King Diamond.
Dr. Mats E. Erikssonan Associate Professor of Paleontology – Department of Geology at Lund University in Lund, Sweden has found a 420 million year old fossilised worm that he has named…wait for it…Kingnites diamondi! How freakin’ cool is that?!
According to a Scandinavian journal of Earth Sciences called GFF, “The polychaete annelid Kingnites diamondi, a new paulinitid genus and species, is described from the Silurian of Baltoscandia. Its large maxillae differ morphologically from those of all other known paulinitids, particularly in being very elongate and having conspicuous myocoele openings and posterior portions of the first maxillae (MI). Albeit rare, this polychaete taxon is highly characteristic and appears to be confined to the Wenlock–Ludlow transitional interval on Gotland, Sweden, and ranges into the upper Ludlow on Saaremaa, Estonia. All samples yielding this species derive from strata formed in proximal carbonate platform environments. The temporal and geographical distribution indicates that it first appeared in Gotland and subsequently spread north-eastwards to the present-day Saaremaa. Kingnites diamondi adds to the list of known members of the Paulinitidae and reinforces the importance of this family, in terms of abundance and diversity, in Silurian polychaete faunas of Baltica. This is the biggest paulinitid recorded from the Silurian with an inferred body length of approximately half a metre and its diagnostic jaws may serve as a proxy for shallow water, backreef (marginal marine to lagoonal) environments.”
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Last Wednesday, Arto Lehtinen of Metal-Rules.com conducted an interview with King Diamond‘s lead guitarist Andy LaRocque, who was asked if they were working on new material. He replied:
“Yeah, we did, and we were actually talking about starting writing songs this fall, but I started many years ago. So I think I already have like five or maybe six songs already for the next album, more or less ready, I would say. I don’t really think that King has come that far in the writing process, but he got a lot of ideas in his head about the next album, I know that.”
King Diamond (the singer) underwent open heart triple bypass surgery back in 2010. The band’s last album, Give Me Your Soul…Please, came out back in June 2007 via Massacre Records.
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Danish metal legend King Diamond, vocalist of the highly influential band Mercyful Fate as well as the band which bears his name King Diamond, recently underwent open heart triple bypass surgery after being transported to the hospital on November 29th. His wife and bandmate Livia Zita has issued the following statement:
“Let me catch you all up on the past couple of weeks’ happenings, because it affects many things.
On Monday the 29th of November, King had to be transported to the nearby hospital by ambulance. After several different tests were done and the EKG machine showing abnormalities, the doctors recommended that he get a cardiac catheterization.
Cardiac catheterization is a procedure where the doctors lead a very thin tube up from the leg and into the heart, where it injects dye into the bloodstream. Then a camera at the end of the tube takes many pictures of the heart’s arteries, looking for blockages.
After this was done, they determined that King had several heart attacks, and three of his heart’s arteries were the cause: one was completely blocked, the second was 90% blocked, and the third was 65% blocked.
The only solution to this was an open heart triple bypass surgery…”
To read the rest of the statement click here.
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If you were only allowed to pick one black metal album to hear for the rest of 2019, I would strongly suggest you choose False's Portent. A dizzying leap forward from an already very talented and rightfully well regarded act, it does not take long into ten minute opener "A Victual to Our Dead Selves" for the song to grab your undivided attention and never let go. Dedicated to the memory of several friends, the record is professional, passionate, heartbreaking and exhilarating. "Rime On The Song Of Returning" is an exceptionally poetic ode to natural abandon that seems to question our size in the scope of the march of time. The band have never sounded more precise, empowered and fiery, like there is a fortune teller at band practice urging them to claim destiny's heights. If this album holds significance of metal's future it is one that honors the best of the past while boding very well for the genre's horizons.
