Prompt: Review an album that you changed your perspective on over time.

Initially, I wasn’t sold on the band Ghost. It wasn’t the band’s masks, or ghastly outfits. It certainly wasn’t their albums dedicated to the conception and birth of the Antichrist, or their presumed ties to the Prince of Darkness. It was that, despite all those things, the band had a sound that was anthemic, melodic, well-constructed with smooth, polished vocals lacking any ferocity. Was this music supposed to be doom metal? Ghost, who commanded such a sinister aesthetic, seemed to be bordering on being simply a garish glam band.

Still, I was struck with feeling something was different about the band. They were far from the first to wear full, face-distorting makeup on stage, or even shield their identities with masks, but there seemed to be a larger narrative here. So, despite my initial hesitations, I persevered through Meliora, their third studio release, and what I found was a talented band that revealed as many facets as the listener is willing to engage with.

What is so compelling about Ghost is the duality existing in everything that they produce–the way in which the listener can easily tackle the band at a superficial level or wade through their material with an eye for the symbolism and wordplay at work. Meliora exemplifies this. The Latin title, often translating to “the pursuit of something better,” is one example of double meaning. The album, belonging to the Antichrist timeline of their two previous releases (the band’s first album Opus Eponymous reveals the conception of the Antichrist, and their second album, Infestissumam, translating to roughly the “most hostile,” depicts the post-birth presence of the devil-made-flesh) portrays a critical look at modern sensibilities, asking whether technological and societal advancements truly make the world better. The message is typically a tired one, and were it framed by U2, it’d likely be grating. Ghost paints our cities as modern Babylons where we are mindlessly precipitating our doom, and it successfully does so without the heavy handedness of bands like Avenged Sevenfold. Meliora presents something “better” on a solely sonic front as well. The album happens to be the band’s first collaboration with pop producer Klas Åhlund. After the group was widely criticized for the mixing quality on Infestissumam, it’s clear the band was pursuing something better and found it.

Though it’s easy to dismiss Ghost as simply harnessing shock and horror in an attempt to rabble-rouse, the band uses its image to deftly point out absurdities of our contemporary world. In a country where 13% of the population believes that the current president is in fact, the Antichrist, their critique seems timely. The theme of Meliora is arguably revealed in the album’s last track “Deus in Absentia ” (God is Absent), recalling Watchmen’s Rorschach surveying New York City and imagining its inhabitants shouting “Save Us!” to whom he whispers, “No.” With the events of 2016 (thus far) slouching toward an ominous future, Meliora’s message feels particularly apt, and sheds light on why humanity looks to demagogues and false gods in times of strife.

But let’s not forget that, above all, the music on Meliora is good. Despite the slick and polished surface that had given me pause, the album is not without grit, and is tongue-in-cheek enough to have me buying into the whole demon-aesthetic thing. Opening with the spacey-horror tone that the theremin has become known for, “Spirit,” the album’s first track, sets Meliora up for the sound of a not-so-distant-future. The song is anthemic, but with the addition of a ghostly choir singing in the background, it recalls a church hymn gone awry. The track is followed by the foot-stomping bass riff of “Pinnacle to the Pit”–possibly the strongest one of the record. Though there is never any outward vocal ferocity, there is something absolutely sinister about the soft growling that the vocals fall into during the choruses on the song, and they compound the driving nature of the bass riff. The decidedly evil tone weaves in and out of the remainder of the tracks, culminating in “Dues in Absentia.” The song has all the trimmings of an arena rock ballad, but set against the ticking of a doomsday clock it is the sound of existential horror manifest musically. Even if the tracks were divorced from their symbolism, they would still yield aural delights that resound with tremendous musical gravitas. Though Ghost may seem kitsch to the skeptical listener, there is much more to unpack than their ghoulish figures may have you initially believe.