Four tracks, forty-five revolutions per minute, and a white border that would quietly disappear. The debut release from Danish heavy metal band Mercyful Fate arrived on November 8, 1982, carrying four songs that had been cut in a studio in Roosendaal, Netherlands. The record, simply titled Mercyful Fate, is often called Nuns Have No Fun or referred to as the first album or EP. Forty-four years later, the disc remains a strange, compact document of a band already fully formed.
The sessions took just two days in September 1982. Jac Hustinx handled production and mixing, while Willem Steetjes served as recording engineer. Stone Studio in Roosendaal was the location, a place far from the Copenhagen metal scene where King Diamond and his bandmates were building their reputation. The speed of the work suggests urgency — a group with a clear idea of what it wanted to sound like and little patience for refinement.
Three pressings, three borders
Rave-On Records, a small independent label, issued the record under catalog number RMLP-002. The cover art came from Ole Poulsen. What collectors noticed over time was that the first pressing carried a white frame around the illustration. A second pressing switched to a black frame. A third pressing, also with a black border, circulated through the Dutch distributor Bertus Holland. The visual difference became a quiet way to date the record's life.
The four songs clock in under twenty-three minutes combined. 'A Corpse Without Soul' runs six minutes and fifty-three seconds, written by Hank Shermann and King Diamond. 'Nuns Have No Fun' is the shortest at four minutes and seventeen seconds, credited to Shermann, Michael Denner, and King Diamond. The other two — 'Doomed by the Living Dead' and 'Devil Eyes' — were written by Shermann and King Diamond, running five minutes and six seconds and five minutes and forty-eight seconds respectively.
King Diamond's early voice
King Diamond's voice is everywhere. Not yet the operatic falsetto that would later define Mercyful Fate's full-length records, but already the same theatrical presence, the same willingness to push toward the macabre. The music is traditional heavy metal, but with a darkness that set it apart from many of its peers in 1982. The production is raw, urgent, the band sounding like it was captured mid-birth rather than polished for radio.
The EP did not stay in its original form forever. In 1987, five years after the first release, the four tracks reappeared in full on the compilation The Beginning. That collection gave the early material a second life for listeners who had missed the initial run. Another thirty-nine years passed before the EP got an official CD release on June 5, 2020, through Metal Blade Records.
From indie to metal label reissue
The 2020 CD edition came with a hardcover digibook and a black polycarbonate disc. It was the first time the EP had been officially available on compact disc, six years ago. For a recording that began as a two-day session in a small Dutch studio, the journey from a limited indie pressing to a major metal label reissue is a strange arc. The music did not change. The packaging did.
The EP's three pressings tell a story of a band moving quickly through its early phases. The white frame of the first edition was replaced by black in the second. The third carried the same black frame but a different distribution network. These are small details, but they become a kind of language for anyone trying to trace the record's path. The name on the cover stayed the same. The urgency of the music stayed the same. Only the perimeter changed.
There is a moment in 'A Corpse Without Soul' where King Diamond's voice stretches over Shermann's riff, and the four-track EP feels longer than its running time. Not because it drags — because it opens a door that would lead to Don't Break the Oath, Melissa, and everything after. But on that first record, forty-four years ago, the door was still ajar. You could hear the air coming through it.