WHETHER PLAYING TO packed U.S. clubs or to tens of thousands of metalheads at Germany’s Wacken Open Air festival, there’s been nothing but love shown to Mercyful Fate since the Danish metal legends emerged from a 23-year live hiatus last summer. Back in the Satanic Panic era of the 1980s, though, the quintet’s mix of occult themes and menacing riff-play was just as likely to make fans of horns-raising youth as it was to meet with the pearls-clutching consternation of parents’ groups and clergymen, who worried the band were nudging kids ever closer to the Dark Lord.
Formed in 1981 by the famously falsetto-voiced-and-corpse-painted King Diamond and guitarist Hank Shermann, Mercyful Fate re-envisioned Seventies-period Purpleand-Priest with a demonic fervor. Shermann and then co-guitarist Michael Denner ran hellfire scale-climbs through early bangers like “Evil” (from 1983’s Melissa), but also brought brutish prog intensity to pieces like “Come to the Sabbath” — a gothic epic off 1984’s Don’t Break the Oath full of quick-pivoting time changes, speed metal chunkiness and a finale where King, naturally, pledges eternal devotion to his “Sweet Satan.” Both their music and iconography were foundational for the first wave of black metal; in the Nineties, good friends Metallica brought the blackest Mercy bits to the masses with Garage Inc.’s 12-minute “Mercyful Fate” medley.
Famously, the band were also listed as one of the “Filthy Fifteen” by the Parents Music Resource Center in a 1985 U.S. senate hearing, their “Into the Coven” cited as a step-by-step guide to bonding yourself with the devil — this among a catalog of similarly blasphemous rites like “Desecration of Souls” and “Satan’s Fall.” Ironically, being labeled obscene in the hearing alongside big-timers like Prince and Madonna raised the band’s profile in the long run.
Though Mercyful Fate first broke up in 1984 (they’d reunite for a run of albums in the 1990s), their legacy escaped unscathed by the moral panic of the PMRC. In another era, though, their musical blaspheming might have faced grave consequences. It’s a theme hinted at in “The Jackal of Salzburg,” a piece the band premiered live in Hanover, Germany, last June — marking the first new material from Mercyful Fate this century. The song — which ebbs and flows between slow-mo metal gloom, clean-channel eeriness and Shermann’s malevolent vibrato — is inspired by real-life witch trials that took place in Salzburg, Austria, between 1675 and 1690, and the more than 130 people executed
