Merciful Release is a

record label A record label, or record company, is a brand or trademark of music recordings and music videos, or the company that owns it. Sometimes, a record label is also a publishing company that manages such brands and trademarks, coordinates the produ ...

started by

Andrew Eldritch Andrew Eldritch (born Andrew William Harvey Taylor, 15 May 1959) is an English singer, songwriter and musician. He is the frontman and only remaining original member of the Sisters of Mercy, a band that emerged from the British post-punk scene ...

, frontman with Leeds band

the Sisters of Mercy The Sisters of Mercy is an English rock band, formed in 1980 in Leeds. After achieving early underground fame there, the band had their commercial breakthrough in the mid-1980s and sustained it until the early 1990s, when they stopped releasi ...

. As Eldritch stated in an early interview, he wanted to hear himself on the radio. He and

Gary Marx Gary Marx (born Mark Frederick Pearman) is a British guitarist and musician. He was a founding member of British rock band the Sisters of Mercy and its lead-guitarist and songwriter from 1980 to 1985. He left the band in 1985 to form Ghost Da ...

(Mark Pairman) played and recorded on the Sisters of Mercy's initial single "Damage Done" and pressed one thousand copies. This record was something of a collector's item. Throughout the early 1980s, the band released several singles on Merciful Release, controlling the format and image of the records, typically in a black sleeve with artwork centrally mounted and a head and star logo on the rear of sleeves. A notable example of this being

Henri Matisse Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (; 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a drawing, draughtsman, printmaking, printmaker, and sculptur ...

's Blue Nude in gold on black for the single Alice. By 1984, the band had signed a distribution deal with

Warner Bros. Records Warner Records Inc. (formerly Warner Bros. Records Inc.) is an American record label. A subsidiary of the Warner Music Group, it is headquartered in Los Angeles, California. It was founded on March 19, 1958, as the recorded music division of the ...

( Elektra in the US) whilst still maintaining control of Merciful Release. In the 1990s, a number of CDs were released on the Merciful Release label for the MK Ultra: their ''Beluga Pop'' and ''This Is This'' albums, and German band Scoda Blush.

List of releases

See also