Satan is often depicted as a figure of seduction. Accordingly, an undercurrent of lustful prurience roils beneath almost everything Ghost does. Forge’s onstage persona leans into that lasciviousness with winking delight, but the songs themselves rarely come right out and say it. That makes “Jigolo Har Megiddo,” a deep cut from Infestissumam, a precious gift. It’s horny as hell, and it rides the sweatiest, sexiest groove in Ghost’s catalog. The lyrics drip with faux-Biblical come-ons and dick jokes, and despite the goofiness inherent in the song’s premise, it manages to sell Forge’s apparently overwhelming sexual prowess. (“You crave the wand” isn’t a line I’ll be trying anytime soon, but more power to him.) In today’s parlance: “Jigolo Har Megiddo” fucks.

Every arena metal band needs a lighters-aloft power ballad in their setlist. Ghost found theirs with “He Is,” a love song whose object, of course, is Lucifer. With its sculpted classicism and symmetrical structure, “He Is” resembles a devotional hymn as much as it does a rock song. Henrik Palm and Simon Söderberg, the Nameless Ghouls responsible for the guitars on Meliora, find an epiphanic depth of feeling in their deft acoustic-electric interplay. Forge, typically the embodiment of arrogant pride, delivers the chorus with something approaching reverent awe, as though the immensity of Satan’s evil has stunned him into humility. Ghost have written other ballads since, but “He Is” remains their gold standard.

2018’s lethargic Prequelle was a disastrous misstep, but Ghost have begun to right the ship with the Aleister Crowley-inspired Impera. (Opeth’s Fredrik Åkesson plays all the guitar parts on the record, which certainly helps.) The album’s lead single, “Call Me Little Sunshine,” plays like a Satanic inversion of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus.” Forge plays the part of Mephistopheles, offering succor through the computer screen: “You will never walk alone/ You can always reach me.” “Little Sunshine” moves at an insistent midtempo stomp, its unhurried gait echoing the calm relentlessness of Forge’s repeated entreaties to “call me.” By song’s end, you’ll want to.

A lot of the Mercyful Fate comparisons bestowed upon Ghost in the early days were thanks to “Satan Prayer.” The Opus Eponymous highlight almost feels like a sequel to Fate’s 1984 classic “The Oath.” Both songs pervert familiar Christian rites, rendering them Satanic. While “The Oath” aped Coven’s 1969 “Satanic Mass,” the eerie “Satan Prayer” is very nearly a line-for-line rewrite of the Nicene Creed. Ghost’s identities were still unknown when “Satan Prayer” dropped, and in that context, the song felt even more sinister — the work of some especially musically gifted Satanic cultists, rather than one of the first great tunes by a highly professional band. Even today, it’s lost little of its power to unnerve.

One thing Ghost typically is not is “epic,” that squiggly, hard-to-define quality that nevertheless comes to define a great many metal bands. “Cirice” is a towering exception. The Meliora centerpiece sees the band gliding gracefully from movement to movement, running a gripping melodic thread that connects delicate acoustic guitar, plaintive piano, thunderous drums, and haunting organ to one of the band’s fattest, most memorable riffs. Forge is at his expressionist best, belting his lungs out in one moment and weaving a gossamer falsetto the next. The song feels truly enormous. It’s enough to make you wish Ghost went epic more often.

The protagonist of “Stand By Him” is burned alive, executed for witchcraft after allegedly tempting a vicar into intercourse. A ’70s exploitation-flick strain of feminism comes out in Ghost’s decision to resurrect her through an occult ritual, unleashing her to run roughshod over her accusers. “It’s the night of the witch tonight,” Forge sings. “And the vengeance is hers for as long as she stands by him.” The “him” in question is Satan, of course, and by the bouncing bass lines and power chord riffage of the song, it sounds like His Infernal Majesty throws a hell of a party. Our nameless heroine gets her revenge, and – to quote Mortuary Drape, another formative Ghost influence – all the witches dance.

“Ghuleh / Zombie Queen” is, like its title implies, really two songs. The first part of the diptych is both a smoldering ballad and an incantation, a piano-driven appeal for the undead object of Forge’s affection to rise from her grave. It’s perhaps the most starkly beautiful passage in the Ghost oeuvre. (Forge would deliberately undercut that beauty in live performances by playing the main melody on a kazoo.) The lightning bolt that splits the song in half is a chugging, repeated power chord. Out of that simple riff, the song transforms into a funhouse. I’ve seen “Zombie Queen” called surf-rock, rockabilly, psychedelia, and haunted house music, but none of those fully capture what feels more like Forge and his Ghouls doing whatever the hell they want. The song isn’t merely academic in its experimentation with new sounds and textures; everything the band is doing serves its huge-as-hell chorus hook: “Black light guides you/ Ghuleh!/ Ghuleh!” It’s Ghost’s longest song, probably their weirdest, and easily one of their best.

Metalheads love Elizabeth Bathory. The Hungarian noblewoman and serial killer, who allegedly bathed in the blood of her young victims, has been the subject of countless musical tributes, none better than Ghost’s “Elizabeth.” Powered by some of the band’s heaviest riffing and dense clouds of pipe organ, the song takes the expected metal-band route of siding with one of history’s greatest monsters. Yet Forge’s pleading, ever-ascending vocal somehow sells its sentiment as sensible — even sweet. Like so many gruesome Ghost tunes, “Elizabeth” is a stealth love song. “You’re still alive, Elizabeth,” Forge sings, calling out to her in the night, reassuring himself that his long-lost flame hasn’t burned out.

Generally, I find Ghost more effective when they have one foot planted firmly in metal. That’s not a hard and fast rule, though, because it doesn’t account for “Square Hammer.” The presence of distorted guitars is the only thing that anchors “Square Hammer” to metal. The song is a Swiss watch of a pop tune, an expertly devised hook delivery mechanism that doles out its dopamine hits on a satellite-synchronized timer. Forge sings the chorus (which itself is built out of a twice-repeated refrain) three times during the four minutes of “Square Hammer,” and each time it feels like he’s scratching an unreachable itch. Like most of the best pop songs, its apparent simplicity belies the dozens of tiny details that make it work — the tinkling glockenspiel melody that follows the “as bells begin to chime” lyric; the snare hits that shadow the same two syllables in each verse; the churning guitar line that underpins and counterbalances Forge’s chorus vocal. These and countless other decisions make “Square Hammer” what it is. It’s not a metal song. It doesn’t matter.

Everything you could ever want from a Ghost song lurks somewhere in the stinking chapel that is “Ritual.” It’s the ur-text for the band’s entire existence. Listening to it now, 12 years after it first trickled its way onto Fenriz’s blog, it’s still easy still hear the world-conquering potential that so many heard back then. The main riff is heavy but not too heavy, leaving plenty of space for the swirling guitar and organ melodies that Forge layers atop it. He tackles the grim lyrics about human sacrifice with a sweetly naïve lilt to his voice, only dropping into a more traditionally metal register for a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, rewritten to praise Satan. More important than any of its individual elements, though, is the way that “Ritual” moves. It feels like driving around on a cool summer night with the windows rolled down, something threatening lurking just beyond your field of vision. Just as “Satan Prayer” invited those Mercyful Fate comparisons, it’s “Ritual” that made people think of Blue Öyster Cult. There’s more than a little of “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” in the song, in the way it hides a razorblade of mortality in a candy apple of carefree youth. Ghost would build a career on making evil feel breezy. They never did that better than they did on “Ritual.”