King Diamond

King Diamond gave metal its most recognizable falsetto and its first fully-realized horror concept albums — first fronting Mercyful Fate, whose riffs Metallica covered wholesale, then under his own name with Abigail, the genre’s ghost-story gold standard. The corpse-paint lineage that runs through black metal starts at his face.

Denmark’s chair in the atlas belongs to him: the connective node between 70s occult rock, 80s thrash, and every theatrical frontman since.