The Swedish heavy metal band, Ghost, has shared new details on their upcoming yet-to-be-titled album. The album will be Ghost’s fourth album and is planned to be released in late spring or early summer. The album was recorded last year in Stockholm with producer Tom Dalgety, who has previously worked with Pixies and Royal Blood, and it was later mixed by the prominent music studio engineer, Andy Wallace (who has worked with many legendary bands such as Guns N’ Roses, and Aerosmith) at Westlake Studios in January 2018. “Rats”, “Life Eternal”, “Faith” and “Dance Macabre” are just a few of the song titles that are set to appear on the upcoming LP.
The album is the follow up to their last album “Meliora”, which was released in 2015, and was a great success for Ghost. The album received the Best Hard Rock/Metal Album award at the 2015 Grammy Awards. “Cirice”, Meliora’s lead single was also awarded the Best Metal Performance of 2016’s Grammy Awards.
Tobias Forge, better known as his stage name Papa Emeritus, is the Ghost’s lead singer, who has previously worked with many other bands, including Epugnant, Crashdiet, Magna Carta Cartel, Subvision, and Superior. The 36-year-old Swedish singer, and songwriter, in an interview about Ghost’s upcoming album with Revolver said: “It is loosely themed around the concept of death and doom. It’s a themed album around medieval times, but it’s definitely clinging onto a lot of very current things. The Black Death [plague] is a great example of a turning point for a whole civilization. Complete villages were annihilated. Most people knew very little, so all of it was God or the Devil — and about their faith being questioned: Why are we being stricken down by this great scourge? It must be because of our not fearing God enough and all this superstitious bullshit.” He continued “There’s a lot that you would recognize today in online mannerisms, in many ways, we’ve gone back a few steps because now it’s closer to how it was back in the old days when people were standing at the square and all of a sudden, it’s like in Monty Python’s ‘Life Of Brian’: ‘Stone him! Ra! Ra! Ra!’ Public trials are very unsupervised and extremely swift and speak to the most primordial parts of us.”
Tobias Forge, following a lawsuit filed by his former bandmates in 2017, had to reveal his identity as the front man of Ghost. On his anonymity, Forge in his interview with Revolver said “the original idea of being anonymous was a great, naïve idea on paper in 2008, not knowing to what degree we’d be touring or to what extent this was going to be a professional operation. That regimen is very hard to live by. What I hadn’t foreseen was the fans and their willingness to embrace that and play along. [Laughs] I guess that’s the whole thing with showbiz and magic tricks: It’s like you have a silent agreement with your audience. Now, I feel like this has already become more of an entity on its own. As long as I don’t go onstage completely normal and then jump into character onstage, I assume that most fans would be able to accept me as the creator. I can comment on the work the same way a director would on his movie.”
Photo credit: Boston Lynn Schultz
Leave a Comment