House of God

The ninth studio album was made at the same Texas studio as Voodoo. It was recorded, mixed and mastered at Nomad Recording Studio in Carrollton, near Dallas, with additional recording at Los Angered Recording in Gothenburg. King Diamond, guitarist Andy La Rocque and Kol Marshall produced it. Marshall, the second engineer on Voodoo, was now the engineer, and he mixed and mastered the album together with King Diamond; J.T. Longoria was second engineer. The line-up was King Diamond on vocals and keyboards, Andy La Rocque and Glen Drover on guitars, Dave Harbour on bass and John Luke Hebert on drums. La Rocque wrote the music of "The Trees Have Eyes", "House of God", "The Pact", "Catacomb" and "Peace of Mind"; King Diamond wrote the rest of the music and all of the lyrics. Thomas Holm painted the cover. This line-up did not last. In October 2000 Harbour left and Hal Patino was announced as his replacement, that autumn Hebert left to look after a growing family and a new job, and in January 2001 Drover told fans himself that he had left for personal reasons. The story opens with the claim that Jesus did not die on the Cross but was taken to southern France, married Magdalene and founded a dynasty, and that a church was built on a hill. Surrounded by wolves, the narrator follows a she-wolf up a mountain to a decaying church, where the wolf turns into a woman and he falls in love with her. She is bound by a pact to guard the church unless someone else signs it within a year; to set her free, he signs it himself, and later, in the catacombs, he finds a mummified body wearing a crown of thorns. The album came out in 2000 on Massacre Records in Europe and Metal Blade Records in North America; Massacre also issued it on LP and as a picture disc said to number 500 copies. In the United States it reached number 27 on Billboard's Independent Albums chart.