Greatest Lovesongs Vol. 666

It was recorded at MD-Studios in Munkkiniemi and Peacemakers Studio in Jokela, and produced by Hiili Hiilesmaa, with whom the band would keep working for years. Ville Valo wrote everything on it apart from two covers: Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" and Blue Oyster Cult's "(Don't Fear) The Reaper". The band had coined the phrase "love metal" for their own music around this time, and the line-up was Valo on vocals, Mikko Lindstrom on guitar, Mige Paananen on bass, Antto Melasniemi on keyboards and Juhana Rantala on drums. The record is partly a joke about itself. On the original Finnish pressing the nine songs are followed by tracks 10 to 65, each a different length of silence, and track 66 stays quiet until 5:49, when the instrumental outro of "The Heartless" — taken from the 1996 EP 666 Ways to Love: Prologue — plays it out. That structure is why the whole disc runs to 66 minutes and 6 seconds. The 1998 international pressing puts the same songs in a different order. The sources disagree about the day it came out: the English Wikipedia and Wikidata say 3 November 1997, while MusicBrainz's Finnish release row and the Japanese Wikipedia say the 20th, so only the year is stated here. The Japanese edition followed on 22 February 2006 on BMG Japan as BVCM-37674. The running order here is the nine songs printed on the original.