Satan meets The Darkness in Ghost’s Impera

The first vocalisation on the new album by Ghost is a drawn-out cry lasting more than 10 seconds. The Swedish band’s Satanist regalia suggests it should be the wail of a damned soul condemned to eternal perdition in the infernal flames of hell. But actually it resembles the hearty call of a handsomely maned hard-rock singer whose foot is propped on a monitor and whose hand is raised in a clenched fist — an altogether different kind of worship.

This entertaining routine, a form of arena occultism in which death-metal imagery is commingled with Kiss theatrics, was first unleashed on the world with 2010’s Opus Eponymous. “Lucifer, we are here for your praise,” were the album’s opening words. The dark lord of misrule would have approved of the incantation. But he might have been puzzled by the merry fright-rock gallop that ensued, closer in spirit to Alice Cooper than Aleister Crowley. Were the mysterious Swedes having a laugh at his Satanic majesty’s expense?

Like The Darkness, Ghost tread a fine line between being tongue-in-cheek and straight-faced. They have an enjoyably schlocky back-story in which the band members’ real identities are obscured by pseudonyms and macabre stage make-up. Each of their five albums has purportedly featured a different frontman, a series of antipopes by the ordinal name of Papa Emeritus. Impera is led by Papa Emeritus IV, who is backed by a set of musicians known as A Group of Nameless Ghouls. This gamy air of mystery has thinned over time. In 2017, several ex-Nameless Ghouls sued the band’s leader in a royalties dispute. The man behind the various Papa Emerituses was revealed by the mundane mechanism of a lawsuit (which was dismissed) to be an alumnus of Sweden’s heavy metal and punk scenes called Tobias Forge.

Impera is the successor to 2018’s Prequelle, a concept album about the medieval Black Death. It reached number three in the US charts, but caused grumbles among fans for saturating the music with too much brightness. The new album purports to address a no less weighty topic, the rise and fall of empires. It has been produced by Klas Ahlund, whose previous credits include Madonna and Katy Perry. It maintains the characteristic Ghost contrast between Stygian gloom and pyrotechnic colour, with the dial turned towards a mildly heavier setting than Prequelle.

“Kaisarion” is the song with the drawn-out wail. It’s a first-rate piece of hokum with heads-down riffing, scale-ascending guitar solos and billowing choruses. Forge, in the role of Papa Emeritus IV, sings with the ringing tenor of a US hard-rocker rather than the guttural rasps of a Nordic heavy-metal diabolist. On “Call Me Little Sunshine”, he invokes Crowley’s memory amid the ripe sunset of a Metallica-style ballad. “Hunter’s Moon”, which appeared on the soundtrack to the latest Halloween film, is a slick horror-film anthem.

“Twenties”, which draws links between the rise of fascism in the 1920s and the dire course of the present decade, shakes up the formula with a light-footed mix of industrial metal, pomp-rock and vaudeville. As though exhausted by the effort of holding all these different elements in suspension, the album sags with the final track “Respite on the Spitalfields”, a plodder inspired by Jack the Ripper. But otherwise the tightrope act is accomplished with élan.

★★★★☆

‘Impera’ is released by Loma Vista Recordings