Melissa

Melissa is the debut studio album by the Danish heavy metal band Mercyful Fate, released on 30 October 1983. It was the first record to come out on Roadrunner Records, and it gave the band their first official US release through Megaforce Records. Until then, American fans had needed to hunt down imports of their self-titled EP, while their BBC sessions circulated only on bootleg tapes.

The sound sits closer to the new wave of British heavy metal than to the black metal the band are often linked with, though you can hear hints of what would grow into black, death, thrash and progressive metal. That blend is why Melissa is regarded as one of the first extreme metal albums, and why it mattered so much to metal scenes in the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s. Hank Shermann wrote the music and King Diamond the lyrics.