Ghost frontman Tobias Forge discuss the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and said he believes the conflict will destroy Russian president Vladimir Putin and the “Russian empire.” Forge is notable in the music industry for predicting current events, as he did with the 2018 album Prequelle, which focused on an oncoming plague. Fans believe he was referencing the COVID pandemic.
“We have distanced ourselves from the actual circularity of things and the cyclic nature of everything,” Forge said in an interview. “Therefore it comes as a shock to us that something as barbaric and old-school as war and the threat of war and the threat of authoritarianism and Biblical wrath or pandemics… it actually comes every now and then, as they’ve always done, as they always will. The circularity I’ve been trying to talk about just happens to coincide now with what eventually will fall… the empire [Russia] that will fall because of this, I think, and hope.”
Even further, Forge spent time contemplating Putin’s intentions – attempting to find common ground between him and the Russian politician.
“I’m a nostalgic person myself. When I go into my inner sanctum, it’s the days before Internet, it’s VHS, and I’m far away from every responsibility. I’m just watching VHS films with the stereo on at the same time, sitting and drawing. That’s my safe place,” he said. “Same way on the other side of the world, there’s this guy that dreams of grey skies and an old Soviet Union where he was a KGB officer and maybe he got a little more sense of purpose breaking people’s arms… whatever he did, I have no idea, but maybe that was his happy place, the same way that I dream of the summer of 1993 being one of my happy places.”
Forge even teased his new album about the conflict. He claims that he’s always known that he would make music about the development of empires and their cyclical nature. Impera will detail the greed that – he believes – will lead to the fall of Russia and its leader.
“I already knew several years ago that I was going to make, at some point, a record about empires,” he said. “It’s about the repetitive nature of empires in general and how their self-destruction mechanisms are to blame for its ultimate destruction and annihilation.”
Photo Credit: Boston Lynn Schulz
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