Conspiracy

Conspiracy is the band's fourth studio album and the continuation of the story begun on Them the year before. It was recorded and mixed at Rumbo Recorders in Canoga Park, California, and Howie Weinberg mastered it at Masterdisk in New York. King Diamond produced it together with guitarist Andy La Rocque and Roberto Falcao, who also engineered the sessions and played the keyboards. Chris Tsangarides was brought in to produce the guitar solos and shared the mixing with King Diamond and Falcao, with Gina Immel assisting on the engineering. The cover artwork is credited to Thomas Holm, Studio Dzyan and Torbjörn Jörgensen. The line-up is King Diamond on vocals, La Rocque and Pete Blakk on guitars, Hal Patino on bass and Mikkey Dee on drums. Dee had left the band in 1988 to join Don Dokken, and he came back to record this album as a session musician. King Diamond wrote all the lyrics and shared the music with La Rocque, whose instrumental "Something Weird" is the seventh track. The two guitarists divide the solos between them song by song. The story takes up the narrator's family from Them and brings it to an end with his death, the subject of the closing "Cremation"; "Lies" is the song in which the nature of his "therapy" comes out. The album opens with the nearly nine-minute "At the Graves". Roadrunner Records released it in August 1989, with Roadracer Records handling the United States. It reached No. 67 on the official German chart, and in America it entered the Billboard 200 on 30 September 1989 and peaked at No. 111 on 14 October.