Andy La Rocque states that King Diamond’s goal is to release the new album this year

In an interview with “Reckless” Rexx Ruger on the Pod Scum podcast, King Diamond guitarist Andy La Rocque provided an update on the band’s eagerly anticipated horror trilogy, as per MetalInjection. La Rocque is cautious about the timing, but the first installment, “Saint Lucifer’s Hospital 1920”, is still scheduled for a possible 2026 release.

I really hope so. That’s our goal. We have most of the songs. I sent [King Diamond], I think, eight songs, like, four years ago, and we decided to use three of those. And we actually played one live from those songs. As soon as he’s done with this stuff — he’s gotta write five songs, I believe, and he’s got a lot of the stuff already written down, with the lyrics and everything. As soon as that’s recorded and arranged from his side, we can put the right guitars on, the right drums, bass, and everything. So I really hope it won’t take very long before we can continue working on that. And if that’s the case, we can start recording soon, and during the summer, then we have a chance for it to be released at the very end of the year.

La Rocque clarified the distinction between writing his own songs and contributing to King Diamond‘s while discussing how he approaches performing new King Diamond work as a guitarist.

It depends. Nowadays, King usually has a request for me to play the song the way he would like it to be played. So I probably play my songs a little bit differently than his songs, because I know that, for example, he doesn’t like when I play the rhythms with a vibrato kind of thing at the end of a riff or whatever, because that might be interacting with his vocals that come on later.

But on my songs, I just do what I feel is right to do. I mean, if it’s good for the song, it’s probably good. And if it doesn’t fit, when he puts the vocal on, I change it. But first of all, I just write what comes out of the heart. I don’t really care what other people think about the style or whatever. I just write my stuff, and it’s kind of based in the ’80s. I mean, standard tuning — we don’t tune down with King Diamond, so it’s standard tuning, pretty straightforward. And melodies are super essential. I think it’s so important to have melodies in the songs and create space for melodies, too, for the vocals. That’s really important.