In a recent interview with Sam Acevedo of El Planeta Del Rock, legendary Danish heavy metal singer King Diamond spoke about the new MERCYFUL FATE material, including the song “The Jackal Of Salzburg”, which was performed live for the first time during the band’s spring/summer 2022 tour. Lyrically, the track is inspired by one of the last major witch hunts, the Zaubererjackl trials in Salzburg, Austria (1675-90). 139 people were executed as the followers of Wizard Jackl or Magician Jackl or Jäckel, who was himself never found.

“Right now ‘The Jackal Of Salzburg’ is almost finished,” King said. “I am doing vocals at the moment. When I’m finished, new MERCYFUL FATE bassist Becky (Baldwin) will do bass one more time. She’s done one bass, but we want her to be the last to record. That’s the thing that we want to do for MERCYFUL FATE and KING DIAMOND, is to give the bass player the chance of really doing special stuff, like old URIAH HEEP, for instance. And we did it ourselves with Timi Hansen, when he was playing for both KING DIAMOND and MERCYFUL FATE. The bass player might follow the guitar sometimes, sometimes the bass player will follow vocals or choirs, backing vocals or whatever. I mean, there’s freedom to do extra cool stuff, as long as it all fits together. But that you can’t do until the vocals are on as well. So Becky will do one more round of real delicate bass. And that will be the final thing. But I’m working on recording the vocals right now for ‘The Jackal Of Salzburg’. And there will be one more song that we are working on now. I know Becky has also done the first bass for that. Hank (Shermann, MERCYFUL FATE guitarist) has done all guitars for that. It’s another song. It is called ‘Sacrifice’. It’s about four minutes long. The one I mentioned before is ‘The Jackal Of Salzburg’. It’s nine minutes long. That’s the first one we actually played live sometimes now. But we hope we can get it finished, mixed and released before we come down to South America in April, so that you can hear the version with all the vocals, all the guitars, all the stuff that a MERCYFUL FATE song would normally have had in the old days. So, it makes it different to hear it again live once you have heard the studio version. So that’s what we’re working very hard on right now. And, like I said, ‘Sacrifice’ is the same. It will be given to MERCYFUL FATE guitarist Mike Wead next, I think, to put guitars on it. And then I will also start working on… I have a lot of lyric ideas for that already, ‘Sacrifice’. And I have worked with Hank in the beginning on arranging it the right way for vocals, so it should be pretty ready for vocals now. And there’s a third song I’m not gonna talk about but that we are working on as well. And then I have a couple of songs on my own for MERCYFUL FATE. I have the title track for the next album and some other stuff.”

Becky officially joined MERCYFUL FATE as a permanent member in January. The Birmingham, England-based musician previously toured with MERCYFUL FATE in the fall of 2022 as the temporary replacement for Joey Vera who was unable to make the dates due to a scheduled conflict with his longtime group ARMORED SAINT.

In 2019, it was announced Vera would be replacing Hansen for the band’s summer 2020 European festival appearances due to Hansen‘s cancer diagnosis. Hansen passed away in November 2019 and MERCYFUL FATE‘s 2020 summer festival appearances were rescheduled for 2021, and then to 2022.

MERCYFUL FATE‘s North American tour, which featured support from by KREATOR and MIDNIGHT, followed the band’s headlining performance at the 2022 edition of Psycho Las Vegas.