Evil

"Evil" opens Melissa at 4:45, with music by Hank Shermann and lyrics by King Diamond. It was recorded between July 18 and 29, 1983 at Easy Sound in Copenhagen with the producer Henrik Lund. We found no statement from the band on its subject; a fan blog reads it as existential dread with occult imagery, which is only an opinion. It was not a single, and the BBC Radio 1 session version (4:02) appears on the 2005 reissue of the album.

Metallica covered it in the Mercyful Fate medley on Garage Inc. (1998): an 11:11 track that runs through "Satan's Fall", "Curse of the Pharaohs", "A Corpse Without Soul", "Into the Coven" and "Evil" (3:56 of the medley), credited to King Diamond and Shermann. For Guitar Hero: Metallica, the original masters of "Evil" and "Curse of the Pharaohs" could not be found, so the band re-recorded both at Lars Ulrich's suggestion: guitars under Shermann at Earplug Studio in Copenhagen, King Diamond's vocals at Nomad Recording Studio in Dallas with J.T. Longoria, and mastering by Andy LaRocque. King Diamond said it was a lot of fun and that everything is right where it should be and with a much better sound. The versions reached iTunes on July 14, 2009, with a picture-disc single scheduled for September 1; the game itself came out on March 29, 2009.

On stage

Setlist.fm counts 164 performances of "Evil", the second most played Mercyful Fate song after "Doomed by the Living Dead" (165), ahead of "Come to the Sabbath" (152) and "Satan's Fall" (149). It was fifth of seven songs at Hannover on June 2, 2022, the band's first concert in 23 years, and ninth of eleven at Copenhell in Copenhagen on June 18, 2022; it was also played at Toluca, Mexico on December 4, 2022. The first and last dates were not obtained, and we could not tell which recording our upload is.