Ghost
Opus Eponymous

On the surface, simply another Scandinavian black-themed band trying to overwhelm us with its true/satanic message, the members hide in anonymity under monastic robes and the singer dresses and sees himself as a sort of anti-pope tasked with spreading the message of the evil one on earth and blah blah blah... *WELL!* all this arouses a certain skepticism in me. Is this the band that has recently been garnering many followers in the metal underground? Yet, as popular wisdom narrates, the habit doesn't always make the monk (hehe, what a pun) and already at the first concrete approach with the band, one can sense how in reality, behind all this pageantry, a healthy dose of irony is instead hidden. The name chosen for their firstborn work (which naturally, as they claim, was not conceived by them but dictated directly by that villain the lord of the flies for whom they are just humble mediums) already gives a sense of what vibe is inside the album.

For those who might not be familiar with Latin (or who, like myself despite having five years of high school in said subject, never translated a passage on their own and can barely decline rosa, rosae), "Opus Eponymous" is nothing but the translation of "eponymous work" and tell me if this isn't something brilliantly ironic and delightfully cheeky. A second surprise comes in listening to the actual musical proposal; here we are talking about black in a broad sense, and the component is to be sought more in the luciferian atmospheres and the underlying message (see the immortal and never too much lauded Mercyful Fate of King Diamond), so no endlessly repeated chords with raw dirty production and growls into the microphone; on the contrary, it is warm and melodic, verging almost at times into pop (!) further, the singer not only sings in a fairly pleasant manner but you can even distinguish the individual words!

The sounds are deliberately retro (or to put it in radical chic terms, vintage), so much so that the main reference models here are the already mentioned merciful fate and the Blue Oyster Cult, despite this, the proposal is not purely derivative since the group has managed to modernize these sounds by mixing everything in an original way and adding a good dose of personality.

In short, do not hesitate and join the sect too, the word of the evil one has never been spread in such a catchy way!