Tobias Forge, the frontman and primary songwriter of the Swedish rock band Ghost, has shared some new details about the band’s next album. This newest project will act as the follow-up the Swedish band’s latest album, Impera, released on March 11.

In a recent interview, Forge explains that this latest project will markedly differ from the band’s previous output, such as their March release.  Blabbermouth quotes the artist explaining that he has “an album in my head right now that I think is going to be different from the one I just made… Both [2018’s] ‘Prequelle’ and ‘Impera’ were ideas that I had since six, seven years back. They were so different from each other in the sense that the ‘plague album,’ as I call it, was about the little person’s annihilation on almost more of like a carnal or a God’s wrath point of view, whereas the ‘imperial record’ was more of a structural demise of the mechanics of society. So they felt like two different things and the idea that I have for the next record is also a different thing from that. It’s just a way for me to compartmentalize the ideas of finding new ways to inspire me lyrically and conceptually.”

The frontman goes on to explain more of his motivation to shake things up: “At the end of the day, it’s just rock ‘n’ roll records, 40 minutes of rock music, so it’s just a way to make it interesting for me to work with, and then as a result of that, luckily for a few times now, we’ve been able to put that together and compile it in a way that has a lot of our fans also finding it interesting to dive into. I think that it was just luck that we just happened to release it in a matter where it seems a little clairvoyant. But these are old subjects … everything’s cyclical, that’s the thing, everything just goes in circles so it’s not very hard to be clairvoyant, you can just look back on time and sort of alter it a little, draw on, or shave off a mustache and you have a future asshole who will do something similar to something else a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, three hundred years ago. It’s always the same; it’s very repetitive.”

Read the musician’s full interview with Consequence of Sound here.

Following the release of  Impera, Ghost later released a music video for their track “Spillways.” Forge has recently replied to critics of the band who argue that they are “not metal enough.” The band’s track “Mary on a Cross” recently went viral on TikTok due to fans of Stranger Things.

Photo Credit: Boston Lynn Schulz