In a recent interview with Jimmy Kay of The Metal Voice ( via Blabbermouth ), Andy LaRocque and Pontus Egberg , guitarist and bassist of King Diamond respectively, spoke about the band's next steps.
Currently, the group is touring the United States with the Saint Lucifer's Hospital 1920 , which features two unreleased songs, "Spider Lilly" and "Electro Therapy ." Both songs are part of the tracklist for The Institute , the band's first studio album in eighteen years.
Their last release was Give Me Your Soul… Please in 2007. In addition to those two, the single “Masquerade of Madness” , which was released in 2019, will also be included on the album, which has already been delayed twice .
Asked if the album was finished, LaRocque said: “No, it’s not. We’re still working on it. As soon as we get back from the tour, we’ll have a break for Christmas and then we’ll get back to work. The plan is to have everything ready this spring, and it will be released right after the summer festival tour in Europe. That’s the plan we have.”
LaRocque and Egberg discuss new songs.
Regarding “Spider Lilly,” Andy commented: “This idea came from King [Diamond]. I don’t know exactly when, but he’s been working on it for a while. And I think the lyrics were finalized a few days before the start of the tour, actually. And he sent me the instrumental track a few days, like a week before the tour started, I believe. So, we had to learn it quickly, record it, because we knew we were going to film the video too. So, this is the newest song we have at the moment that we’re playing live. And ‘Spider Lilly’ is a bad girl. She can also be good. We’ll see. I think it’s going to change a bit, actually. It’s a character, part of the story that King is working on now.”
Pontus added: “As Andy said, we only heard the rough demo of this song a week before we traveled to the United States, and we had to learn and record it quickly as well. And now I think it’s already been mixed.”
Andy added: “It will be released as a video single and a single. I don’t know exactly when. But we also have other songs in the works. King has a lot of ideas and I have several songs that are in the demo stage, ready or almost ready.”
Regarding “Electro Therapy,” La Rocque commented: “It’s been around for — let’s see — a few years, actually. I think I started writing the initial riffs on the 2019 tour, actually. And there have been some changes over time, especially in the verse part, trying to find the right key for King to sing and all that stuff. And I think what we have now is probably the final version, and it’s going to be on the album too, and King is still making some adjustments to the lyrics.”
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