Them

Two of the five members changed for the third album. According to Decibel, Michael Denner had been replaced on guitar by Pete Blakk, while Timi Hansen left on good terms after teaching his successor, Hal Patino, the band's live set. The booklet credits King Diamond with vocals, Andy La Rocque and Blakk with lead guitar, Patino with bass and Mikkey Dee with drums. It was recorded and mixed at M.M.C. Studio in Copenhagen, produced and mixed by King Diamond and Roberto Falcao with La Rocque and Dee assisting, and Falcao engineered it and added the keyboard effects. King Diamond wrote all the lyrics and most of the music; La Rocque wrote the music of "Mother's Getting Weaker" and "A Broken Spell", and the two wrote the title track together. The story's central figure is a boy called King, and it begins with his grandmother coming home from a psychiatric hospital. Decibel adds that King Diamond had lost his father the year before and that this was the first album he wrote afterwards; the music box heard on the opening and closing tracks was his own as a child. The cover artwork is by Studio Dzyan, Thomas Holm and Torbjörn Jörgensen, with photographs by Ole Lundgren and Frasse Franzén; the sleeve prints the title in quotation marks. The CD adds a bonus track without music, "Phone Call", which Roadrunner described as a call from King's dead grandmother that fills in the details of the story. Roadrunner Records released the album in Europe in June 1988. In the United States Roadracer Records issued it through MCA; it entered the Billboard 200 on 23 July 1988 and peaked at No. 89 during 12 weeks on the chart, and the same issue of Billboard listed a new video clip for "Welcome Home". Decibel notes that the band was on its way to Los Angeles at the time and that this was its last album recorded in Denmark. Dee left after this record and came back as a session drummer for the next one, Conspiracy.