He also made it clear that there would be no wasting of studio time. “He realized that him walking in the room and being Marilyn Manson didn’t matter to me,” said Mr. Bates, a married father of two daughters, whose email auto-signature is “kindest regards.” For Marilyn Manson, the collaboration felt less like work than a conversation, he said. “I’ve never really had that sort of musical brotherhood in the same way,” he said.

Mr. Bates also provided lyrical direction. “I said, ‘I’m not going to do this with you if it’s an angry manifesto,’ ” he recalled. “ ‘The only thing you have left is to inspire people with your words.’ ”

For his fans, inspiration comes in the embrace of darkness. As always, he found material in his sometimes-combative relationship — his girlfriend, Lindsay Usich, with whom he shares a newly acquired home in the Hollywood Hills, is a photographer and model — freely cribbing from their fights. “Don’t bring your black cloud to bed,” he texted her, in what became a lyric in “The Devil Beneath My Feet.”

The album’s closing song, “Odds of Even,” which begins with the sounds of coyotes attacking in the hills outside Mr. Bates’s studio (as recorded by Marilyn Manson) is perhaps the most introspective. “My dagger and swagger/Are useless in the face of the mirror,” he sings in a deep, emo register.

It wasn’t all emotional drudgery and death. “If I didn’t hold the creative process so sacred,” Mr. Bates said, “and I had just been a whore and put cameras in my studio, I would have had the greatest reality show of all time,” tracking his star’s eccentricities and visits by the likes of Keanu Reeves and Mr. Depp.