Nothing the Danish five piece played between 1981 and 1985 sounds like black metal. Almost everything black metal did when it was not playing came out of Copenhagen. That is the verdict, and the rest of this piece is the evidence, because the standard account has the influence pointed in the wrong direction: it hunts for proto riffs on two albums that contain none, and it walks straight past the conduct, the props and the refusal to laugh, which are the things that actually crossed the water.
Mercyful Fate formed in the spring of 1981 out of a Danish punk and metal group called Brats, after a label asked for something more commercial and two of the members declined to supply it. King Diamond took the microphone, Hank Shermann and Michael Denner took a guitar each, Timi Hansen took the bass and Kim Ruzz took the drums. They could all play, which separates them from every other name in the founding roster, and the separation is the whole reason they are hard to place among the bands that came before Norway.
Two albums, thirteen months, one producer
The entire body of work that matters here is two records. Melissa was cut at Easy Sound in Copenhagen between 18 and 29 July 1983 with Henrik Lund producing and reached shops that October as the first album Roadrunner ever put out. Don't Break the Oath came out of the same room with the same producer in May 1984 and was released on 7 September. Twelve days of studio time for the first, one month of sessions for the second, sixteen songs between them, and a reputation that has outlived most of the decade's better funded records. Rolling Stone placed Melissa seventeenth among the hundred greatest metal albums in 2017. Martin Popoff gave the second a flat ten out of ten in his collector's guide to the eighties.
What is on them is not primitive and was never trying to be. Shermann and Denner wrote harmonised twin guitar lines of the kind British bands had been playing since 1979, Ruzz kept time like a session player, and the singer sang, in a countertenor that goes up into a falsetto scream and comes back down into a menacing baritone inside the same verse. "Satan's Fall" runs eleven minutes and twenty three seconds across half a dozen sections. "The Oath" runs seven and a half. These are constructed pieces with key changes and returning themes, closer in architecture to progressive rock than to anything the underground would attempt for another decade.
Don't Break the Oath isn't great because it's a roadmap to some future sound; this is '80s metal in excelsis.
Louis Pattison, Pitchfork, 10 September 2018
The occult, delivered without a wink
Here is the part that travelled. Every other band in the founding generation treated Satanism as material: a set of images borrowed for the duration of a record and dropped in the interview afterwards. The Danish singer did not drop it. He built a stage altar, put a human skull on it and gave the skull a name, sang in character for the length of a show and answered questions in character afterwards, and he has since described his position plainly as a life philosophy taken from Anton LaVey rather than a religion, a distinction he has held to for forty years without once softening it into a joke.
The cost of that seriousness was paid immediately. "Into the Coven" went onto the Filthy Fifteen, the list of songs the Parents Music Resource Center put before a United States Senate committee in 1985, which is how a Danish band with two albums to its name ended up as evidence in Washington. A generation of Norwegian teenagers read the whole business exactly backwards and took it as instruction. What they took was not a riff and not a tempo. It was an inverted cross worn as jewellery rather than drawn on a demo sleeve, an occult vocabulary handled as though the books had actually been read, and above all the rule that you do not admit any of it is a performance.
Copenhagen supplied no sound at all. It supplied a refusal to break character, and the refusal turned out to be the more portable inheritance.
April 1985, and what the split produced
| Name | Role | After April 1985 |
|---|---|---|
| King Diamond | Vocals, keyboards, harpsichord | Founded his own band the same year and has fronted it ever since |
| Hank Shermann | Guitar | Wanted the commercial turn that ended the band; present at every reunion since |
| Michael Denner | Guitar | Followed the singer into the solo band; not invited to the 2019 reunion, and told two days before it was announced |
| Timi Hansen | Bass | Also went into the solo band; died on 4 November 2019 |
| Kim Ruzz | Drums | Left, and stood with the others again in 2017 to collect a Danish pioneer prize |
They broke up in April 1985 over the oldest argument in the business, one guitarist wanting a broader audience and one singer refusing to go and get it, and the refusal is the reason there is anything to write about. Within months he had a band under his own name with Denner and Hansen in it, and Fatal Portrait arrived on Roadrunner on 14 March 1986 carrying something the first two albums had only gestured at, which is a story told across a whole side by a narrator who is not the singer. That method, a horror novel with a rhythm section, ran through the records that followed and is a second inheritance entirely, claimed later by bands who never went near an inverted cross.
Four of the five came back in 1992 and put out In the Shadows on Metal Blade in 1993, then Time, Into the Unknown, Dead Again and 9 across the rest of the decade, and stopped again in 1999. The full time reunion was announced on 1 August 2019. Hansen died three months later.
Where the line actually runs
You can hear the debt being paid in public. Metallica put a medley of five of these songs on Garage Inc. in 1998, which is roughly the widest audience anything from this catalogue has ever reached. The same year Listenable in France assembled a tribute album on which Emperor covered "Gypsy" with the keyboards well forward and a startlingly accurate imitation of the falsetto, and Immolation took on the eleven minute one. A Norwegian symphonic black metal band and an American death metal band, on the same disc, going back to two Danish records from the middle of the previous decade.
The honest reckoning is that the musical inheritance is almost nil and the rest of it is enormous. Nobody in Norway harmonised a guitar line, nobody sang in a countertenor, and the whole doctrine that came out of Oslo was a war on exactly the competence these records are built from. What crossed intact was the altar, the character, the seriousness and the licence to make a metal album that tells a story with a plot in it. A band that could play better than anyone around them handed the next generation everything except the playing.
The other half of the visual inheritance came from further away and cost far less to make. Face paint, bullet belts and a photograph taken in a cemetery arrived from the southern hemisphere on records pressed in the hundreds, which is the subject of sarcofago, Vulcano and the South American First Wave. The Swedish half of the story, where the actual sound was built and then abandoned, runs through blood Fire Death and the Birth of Viking Metal.
