In the meantime, King have participated to "Probot", a metal project from Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters). The songs on the album were written entirely by Grohl, who then sent out these recordings to all of his favorite metal vocalists, including King Diamond. He invited them to write the lyrics to one song and then to record it on the album. King's song was titled "Sweet Dreams" and is a slow and heavy song. The music is not King Diamond-style music since Grohl have written it, but with King in his mind; it has a quiet intro before it gets heavy and builds up. In the beginning of the song, there are all these little voice saying, "Let Me In... Aaahh Let Me In...", then a classical King Diamond laugh and the song goes on, and it also includes a blistering solo of Soundgarden's Kim Thayill too. The song tells the story about someone who have lost its soul, which is already in hell, and tries to sneak into someone else's dreams to steal its soul. King was very pleased to be invited to participate to this album, and absolutely had fun doing it. The "Probot" project originally had to be released in fall 2002, but the release date have been pushed back many times until February 10th 2004. Released on Southern Lord Recordings, it was available on both CD and double-LP format.

On March 11th 2001, Mike Wead was officially announced to be the replacement of Glen Drover, but not only for the European part of the "House Of God" tour, but as a permanent member. This tour began on March 13th in Russia and ended on April 30th in Holland.

On March 26th 2001, Massacre Records released "Nightmares In The Nineties", which is a compilation of King Diamond's latest studio albums. This compilation, which have not been approved by King before its release, featured 14 songs taken from the albums "The Spider's Lullabye", "The Graveyard", "Voodoo" and "House Of God". These same four albums then had to be re-released a few months after that in a boxset called "Decade Of Horror". Once again released by Massacre Records, it contained 4 King Diamond vynil picture discs and it was actually limited to only 1,000 copies.

It was on May 15th 2001 that the recording sessions of the next King Diamond began. The band would then work on this album for 5 months, as it ended in the following September. Titled "Abigail II: The Revenge", this album would be the sequel of the album "Abigail", released 14 years before. When King was on tour about three years before, people were coming up to him and said that it would be cool if he made another album like "Abigail", but he was very against doing something like that, copying something that he had done before. King is into finding room for progression with what he does with his bands, so he never wanted to go back and re-do something. However, the great thing about how the "Abigail" album left off was that there were a lot of things that was untold about the story, stuff that was never fully explained, and that has allowed him to go back and bring them into the spotlight. The setting is still the same and the two main characters are there, that being Abigail and Jonathan, so fans will know where they are and who is a part of the tale, just eighteen years later. Sometimes, it may happen that some story characters can be based upon actual persons, and that's exactly what happened for "Abigail II", as Jonathan's servant in the story, Brandon Henry, is directly based upon King's house caretaker named Henry. King used his likeness for this nice guy with the shaved head. Prior to that, he asked him if he could use him in the story, and he replied that he would be honored even though he could die in it.

When the band recorded "Abigail", the band was phenomenal. Over the years, it just didn't seem like the right time and place, or even the right musicians to get things going. Three years before, when the ideas formed about possibly doing this album, King felt it wasn't the right band, but this time, with the line-up changes he felt it was the time to really do it. Never before King was so excited about a drummer before than this time with Matt Thompson, as whatever Andy or King came up with musically, he could play and bring a special style to. King even tried a few new voices to go along with these fresh ideas, styles of voices he had never done before, it really got him excited about this album and what they were bringing to it. King felt this music captured the mood of the old times of King Diamond, but just a bit more complex.

As always, King started working on the demos in his own small home studio, and just got together the guitar tracks with a drum machine and some keyboard work and brought the ideas to the band so they could see what he was trying to bring out of the music. The demos contained no vocals or solos, just the music. So from there they started to write, and when they write as a band, it really can go anywhere as long as the music is good. There are never any doubts that it can be done, or they are making a mistake. King knew the guys were able to make this a great recording experience because they are all so talented. They all were so focused and it just shows with the recording; the demos sounded pretty good, as demos would sound, but once they got into the studio and added vocals and more harmonies and beefed up the guitars, the music was just growing into something great. King really felt this line-up made this album what it is.

"Abigail II" came together pretty much like every concept album King have previously done. The band had the earlier music working as a foundation and then started to add guitars, and Matt had a lot of ideas for the album too, as he went out of his way to create some stuff that King completely loved and that really made him more excited about the way things were heading. once the music was written, then, King starts doing the lyrics. Usually, the inspiration for the plot of the story and the characters comes to him in a pretty short time. It usually has something to do with his home, which looks pretty eerie with a lot of weird stuff, and he needs that special atmosphere to be able to do that. If you get the right story, the right music and the right flow of things, any concept record is possible. The complexity of the story has lots to do with the time it takes to get the story completely finished. Some stories are more complex than others in certain ways because it's harder to make it logical. You have to go forth and back all the time and depending on that complexity, once King has a short story finished, there’ll be a lot of going through that story in his mind and really questioning himself very hard to make sure nobody can come along and say something is not logical or just doesn't fit in. He has to be able to explain all and that’s the hard part, to be super-critical of what you’ve done and make sure it’s explainable. But otherwise, it’s very different from story to story how long it takes to get done. It’s difficult to do in a very short time because you have very limited space on an album and it has to be done in a way that you don’t go over the top because you take away from the musical element. You can’t have all these theatrical voices talking throughout the album; it is musical too. It’s not that easy, but that’s the cool thing about it, it’s a challenge to make it work. After that, usually the music is written, so he divides the story in chapters, then takes each of them and attaches it to the music depending on the mood of the music and the story, so each chapter becomes a song. In the studio, as expected, the band had to work King's voice around the guitar parts, everything from the simple riffs to the more killer guitar solos. About 70% of King's vocal melodies that he had going in work, the rest he had to work around what the music has become. In the studio, he has to find the right voice to fit the music parts. When he was working on the demos, he just had a standard voice in mind, but with the music taking on such character, the right voice to capture the emotion was needed, so he made points on the lyric sheets where the falsetto or growl voices go and just have a good idea of what he was to bring to the songs. This allowed him to help shape the rest of the material, knowing where his emotions were intensified and how they were changing. Creating harmonies of all types is a lot of hard work, but it makes you really become part of the music. A lot of this is planned beforehand, but it never fully works out once you hit the studio.

Once again, during the recording of this album, there were some strange things that happened. King had to re-record 4 of the songs twice, they couldn't use them because some equipment was not right when it was going through the different machines to the tape recorder. When they found it, it had already fucked up 4 of the songs so King had to redo them, including all the backing vocals, everything, which meant a lot of extra work. It didn't happened because this studio was bad or anything as King would definitely like going back there; it was just like Abigail was there and she didn't want to be reborn! Sometimes, King and Kol Marshall, the producer, were alone in the studio, doing vocals, mixing and mastering things, while some strange things happened. They had just turned the machines off, they would sit down and talk and suddenly the tape recorder started playing out of the blue, as none of them could have touched it, but the play board was pressed and the tape was running. For this album, Mike recorded about two solos in his own little home studio since he wasn't done with all his solos when he left the studio. He had like a 24-track super studio that was also where he recorded his own solo albums; he had a great set-up over there, so there was no problem at all for him to record over there.

When King is working in the studio, it takes about 12 hours a day at least. Then he goes home, buys some food on the way home, going into the supermarket at 3:00am sometimes. Then he eats, goes to bed at 10:00pm, gets up at 8:00am again. Gives the cats some food, checks the mail, pays bills and then, totally stressed, goes back to the studio. And once again, back there for another 12 hours. Many songs takes a huge amount of time, like "The Wheelchair", among others, which took at least 10 hours, since there is about 80% backing vocals and only 20% are lead on that song. And when singing a song, it's like 6 to 7 times at least. He sometimes can sings one line 6, 7 or 8 times before it gets the feel he really looks for. Much more effects were used in the vocals parts to bring a better feel for a horror story this time, as it was not as dry as the latest albums he have done.

They also had a guest on this album, a 6 year-old girl named Alyssa Biesenberger, who played the role of Little One. She was the daughter of a friend of a guy that Kol Marshall, the producer, knew. She is talking, except for two words which King did, the complete outro as she could read everything perfect. So they started doing each line a couple of times to get the right feel for it, and then they asked if, in the end, she could do a little crying. Suddenly, she opened the door and said that she could say these lines and cry at the same time. They were just sitting there, with their mouths wide open. In only one take, it was perfect! She appears several additional times also in "Mommy" and "Little One" also. We can also hear Abigail one or two times in the story too, one time where she is crying and one time where she is laughing, but that was actually taken from a sound library, just like the rain and thunder effects in "The Storm", which originally comes from these samples, but have been modified a bit. They had this nice sound library sent from a guy in Portugal who works on movies and had these great effects. However, the intro is not made from sound libraries as King played all the keyboards on it himself.

For the album cover, it was supposed to be done by some guy in Sweden but something went wrong with him as he wanted to sell a cover he already did; he just turned the horse carriage around, so it rides the other way, it was red instead of blue and it had the mansion in the background burned down. But they didn't ordered it and it had nothing to do with the story; they couldn't use that at all as this time, the band wanted a cover which actually reflected the story, at the opposite of the first "Abigail" cover. Then they got very busy finding someone else to do the cover for them, and they found a guy from Seattle called Travis Smith, who previously did the Nevermore album covers. On the album cover, we could see the 18 year-old Abigail as Travis tried to put the face of Jodi in, which is the girl who had to dance and act in King's shows. However, it didn't really worked out since only the eyes looks like Jodi's, as nothing else looks like her. Not only Travis did the cover, but he also did some other things for the booklet inside. Originally planned for a Halloween 2001 release, the release date has been pushed until January 28th 2002.

Originally, the band planned to tour the USA first, and then going in Europe. There were also some discussions about a live triple-CD, which would have featured the whole "Abigail" and "Abigail II" stories on the first 2 discs, and some other songs on the third disc. A live DVD of this tour was also planned at the time, however, at a certain point, nothing was sure yet, as there were suddenly rumours that there would be no tour in support of "Abigail II". After many months of uncertainty, King Diamond sadly announced officially in the following month of July that there would definitively be no tour to promote the new album, even though it did sold quite well. The reason was pretty simple: due to the increasing loss of sales because of Internet piracy of downloading songs for free and home burning CD's, the profits of record companies took a nose dive, so there was much less money availlable to afford a promotional tour. On his side, what King thinks of the Internet overall is that it's such a big progression in keeping the world smaller. He doesn't have Internet and he's not really interested in it either as he is scared of it for the fact that he knows himself too well: he would get on it and just have to see everything and go to all these sites and spend hours and hours on it when he should be in the studio working on some songs. The same thing goes with cable TV, which he doesn't have either. He's such a sports freak that he would just sit there and watch soccer, formula 1 racing or hockey games all the time, which he likes so much that he loves going to see in Dallas when he has the chance to. During this time, however, King haven't lost his time as he already had another story ready for his next album; in early 2003, he was already in the studio recording it. During the month of March, King have been applying for naturalization in the USA, in order to become officially a US resident.