The gentlest song on Ghost’s 2015 album Meloira, “He Is” is an anti-hymn. If you were to hear it out of context, you would have little inclination to call it metal on a pure sonic level. The delicate picking of the song’s verses, the rapturous vocals, the repetition of the song’s title, everything except the guitar solo makes “He Is” sound like the kind of song you could find in a Church hymnal. But when you listen to the content of the lyrics, especially if you’re the kind of person whose mind goes to church when you hear a song like “He Is”, you realize that it’s as metal as music gets. It is literally Devil worship.

The imagery of the song inverts all expectations of holiness conjured by the song’s composition. The verses tell of star crossed lovers reaching out to a beast with many names, standing next to the abyss, and world in flames. The second verse lyric “The guidance of the Morningstar will lead the way into the void,” takes the brightest of Lucifer’s titles and positions it as virtuous, yearning for annihilation and rejecting the Christian promise of life everlasting. It’s esoteric stuff, making the subversion all the more insidious as it builds into a God-slaying refrain:

He is

He’s the shining in the light without whom I cannot see

He is

Insurrection, he is spite, he’s the force that made me be

By positioning the song’s subject as a “shining in the light” Ghost inverts the holiest value of the divine, flipping a theological trope and conjuring feelings of revelation. How, after all, can something shine brighter than heaven? A normal hymn would simply have the Lord shine in the dark and bring you away from it. “He Is” positions the light of eternal salvation as blind servitude that you can be liberated from. What’s more, thanks to the hymnal structure, Ghost makes it all but impossible not to sing along, multiplying the tribute to the Beast in accordance with the elementary school mathematics of prayer power.