King Diamond recently gave us all hope that his new album will soon surface as he played two brand new songs – "Spider Lilly" and "Electro Therapy" – live. So when can we expect King Diamond's long awaited new album The Institute to come out? According to guitarist and songwriter Andy LaRocque, everything should be wrapped up in Spring 2025 and the album will be out before King Diamond does the European festival circuit in the summer.
"We are still working on it and as soon as we get back from tour we're going to have a little Christmas break and then we're going to pick it up again," said LaRocque. "So the plan is to have everything done this spring. It will be released shortly after the European summer Festival tour and all that that's the plan we have."
LaRocque also spoke pretty extensively on the new songs in the same interview. LaRocque said "Spider Lilly" was only completed a few days before the tour, and should be one of the singles for The Institute.
"That idea came up from King. I don't know exactly when but he's been working on it for quite a while. I think the lyrics for it got done just like a few days before the tour started actually. He sent me the basics of the song just a few days, like a week prior to the tour starting, I believe. So we had to learn it real fast, record it because we knew that we're going to shoot it on video too. So it's the newest song we have right now that we actually play live.
"'Spider Lily' is a mean girl who can also be good, we'll see if it's going to change a little bit. It's a character part of the story that King is working on right now. It's going to be released as a video single I don't know when exactly. We also have other songs in the loop too, King has a lot of ideas and I have a lot of songs that's kind of in the demo stage done or finished."
On "Electro Therapy", LaRocque said that one's been around for about five years now: "It's been around for a couple of years actually. I think I wrote the intro riff back in 2019. There have been some changes back and forth especially on the verse, trying to find the right key for King to sing on and all that stuff. I think what we have now is probably the final version and it's going to end up on the album too. King is still working on some fine tuning on the lyrics, you will hear that tonight. It's like different [lyrical] versions every night."
