Billowing goth-metal anthem Hunter’s Moon piles on the pantomime drama with cascading piano and monastic chants, though it’s hard to tell whether the chilly mist that surrounds it is dry ice or Aquanet hairspray.

Opening track proper Kaisarion lays out the rules of engagement, kicking in with an honest-to-god 1987-vintage scream that’s instantly followed by the kind of staggeringly brilliant chorus that rock bands forgot how to write years ago. Every chorus is bigger, every backing vocal is stacked to the heavens, every booming drumbeat makes Def Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar On Me sound like a pensioner absent- mindedly tapping on a pile of wet bog paper with an out- of-date sausage roll. The glorious, arms-in-the-air approach of its predecessor is ramped up a hundredfold here. With Impera, Ghost have gone several steps further, serving up the greatest arena rock album since the invention of the permed mullet/slashed denim jacket combo. A diabolic masterplan has slowly unfolded over his band’s four albums to date, with Ghost revealing the unabashed arena rockers beneath their (oc)cult metal raiment on 2018’s Prequelle being the biggest tell so far, not least Dance Macabre, which found our (anti-)hero hooking up with Avicii and Madonna’s old songwriters to deliver the 80s hard rock dancefloor banger to end all 80s hard rock dancefloor bangers. Sly old devil that he is, Tobias Forge has known it all along.

Europe The Final Countdown Torrent 320