Ghost: How the phantom of rock conquered the charts

On stage, Papa V Perpetua is a devilish maestro decked out in corpse paint — an enigmatic showman assembling a zany rock opera with his legion of incognito backing musicians known as the Nameless Ghouls. The frontman revels in grandeur: big theatrics and sprawling songs dealing with the occult, demons and devastation. Running a carousel of dark characters, Ghost anonymously delivered spectacular pyro-clad performances until 2017, when a court case unravelled the true identity of their Catholic-style zombie pope: Tobias Forge. Unrattled, he pushed onwards, reinventing his spooky image with every lore-laden album cycle.

‘I feel the honour of doing this because you never know if you ever get to do it again,” Forge says solemnly over video call. It’s early afternoon on a February day in Sweden, and the musician has been zipping through press duties — including a Rolling Stone UK shoot a week earlier, in London — seemingly unperturbed by the release of Ghost’s explosive new album Skeletá. Instead, his mind is elsewhere: pro-league Swedish hockey. “I’m struggling with missing out as much as everybody else, but I know that I’m going to be away a lot. We have tickets for my hockey team, Linköping HC,” he says, laughing. “I’m about to miss the playoffs! I need to see at least one home game.”

Soaking up his time back in Stockholm, where he lives, the singer admits his everyday life is far removed from the souped-up shows he throws under the guise of his fiendish cosplay counterpart. Instead, he’s a self-labelled domesticated family man. “My trick is not to think about it too much because if I do, it feels a little bit daunting at times,” he says. “The character is fuelled on a quite large degree of spontaneity. If I start thinking too much about who is who, it becomes a little bit of a mindfuck. I choose not to think about it too much so that he will only appear when it’s time to go.”

Forge has been settling into the chalky skin of Ghost for nearly 20 years. First emerging in 2006, the band’s eccentric fusion sound took hold in Forge’s native Linköping, in southern Sweden. Here, the singer was a youthful experimentalist, blending everything from stage music to black metal.

“When I wrote [2010’s] ‘Stand By Him’, I realised I could write a song that combined old new wave with adult-orientated rock and occultism and a little bit of West End,” he explains. “After that, I’ve always started a new record on what we have: a few songs lying around and a million different ideas.”

Since then, Ghost’s earworm fusions have been nicknamed everything from a satanic modern-rock rendition of ABBA to the parody term Scooby Doom. However, as the band’s cult-like following grew, Forge watched on as the ghoulish glam-rock project quickly began to collect accolades — a Grammy in 2015 for Best Metal Performance, four Top 10 albums (Prequelle, Impera, Phantomime and Rite Here Rite Now) in the UK, and achieving the highest grossing hard-rock cinema event in North American history with Rite Here Rite Now.

“I’ve been always thinking about what we would do next. Always walking off the stage thinking about the next step, and that has been the end of every tour I’ve ever done with Ghost,” he says. “I’m always finishing a tour cycle thinking about the new record that I’m going to make, all the new places that we’re going to play and everything else I want to achieve.”

Now, with a new album on the way, the musician is ready to shift his perspective of chasing what’s next and, instead, settle into the experience of right now. “I’ve finally come to a point where I know we have this record that I feel super proud of. We have a great tour ahead of us, and I’m just going to enjoy that. Having been working with this Ghost project for 15 years straight, I’ve always thought of my career, the momentum and the whole movement to be very elusive. The momentum needed to constantly be filled with content. I hate that word, but it’s a word that people understand. It [needed] to be filled with meaning and as many achievements as possible before it was over.”

You might think that Ghost are offbeat and cartoonish, but Forge is achieving the unexpected — following the glossy legacies of macabre bands. Creeping towards a double decade of ghostly impersonation, the project’s effervescent throwback sound is keeping an alt community hooked on heady guitar solos and hair metal nostalgia reminiscent of KISS and newer hellraisers Slipknot. Ambitious from the offset, Forge is clear-cut on his duties as a leading man and key curator of this otherworldly musical universe. “If you want to be super pragmatic, I’m technically a solo artist. I don’t have to think in terms of a group, but everybody needs to understand that my job is a group effort,” he says. Without reservation, he drops names of the greats: The Beatles, Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin — he credits the work of his teammates but emphasises that he’s the soul of the project.

“We’re a group working together, but practically, if the label is asking Ghost to make a record, they don’t call a group of people — they will call me because it’s my responsibility. So, as a creator and a writer, I don’t think that there is such a thing as an end until the actual end.”

Yet, the end of Ghost feels a way off. On full-length album Skeletá, Forge slips into a new, hauntingly intimate theme: humanity. Across high-pitched soprano choirboys and electric guitar power chords, a cataclysmic tale of morality and humanity ensues. Instruments segue in and out; drums, synths and strings crash in like a metal-trodden prayer. The sharp-tongued aggression of Ghost’s spiky last album, Impera, is usurped by songs chasing optimism, love and reflection.

With Skeletá, Forge wanted to stray away from the pitfalls of recreating the same kind of project twice. “There was an abundance of social and political commentary on the previous album. I completely stand by that record 100 per cent and do not feel that there was something wrong with it, but I definitely felt that I was not interested in writing an Impera Two,” he explains. The musician wanted to preserve the sanctity of each Ghost era being easy to define. “I wanted [Skeletá] to become more of an introspective, healing record, a new record that shone a light on the innards of my mind.”

If anyone can get away with naming a song after Oscar Wilde’s infamous jail letter (‘De Profundis Borealis’), it’s Ghost. The song meanders through Bon Jovi-style lyrics, accrediting the highs and lows of life: “When tomorrow comes you will know / That the morning thaws the ice”. While Forge didn’t pull from the Irish poet, the album exudes a connection with humanity and character. It cascades, from start to end, like a rhythmic epic journey, one that aspires to philosophise humanity but feels more like a pantomime-esque odyssey.

“I’ve mostly described the record as one about being human. Life isn’t always great. There’s a non-deliberate, self-inflicted sense of unhappiness that we have subjected ourselves to because we have somehow got the idea that life is supposed to be 100 per cent positive,” Forge says, reflecting on the album. “Life is, unfortunately, a balancing act where good and bad is a pendulum going back and forth, and that’s something I’m guilty of not intuitively feeling all the time. That is a very natural part of the struggles of being alive, and it’s perfectly fine.”

Compared to previous albums, Ghost’s new direction may feel more open-ended, but it remains steadfast to its jaunty metal roots. Forge knits together a tracklist that taps into the intricacies of humanity, centring songs on intense feelings. With Skeletá, the singer shares that he aimed to create a thorough and easy-to-follow narrative that could appeal to all listeners. “Making a record is a very dynamic process where you might start with just a blank paper, but I’m not like that. I need to have some sort of direction, theme or a concept that I’m working within, otherwise the box that I need to think within becomes too elastic,” he says.

“It’s like being an artist and looking at a blank canvas. Art could be whatever you want it to be, be it excrement or the Mona Lisa. I need to have a concept, so, for this record, it was going to be introspective, naked, simple, basic human subjects: love, hate, despair, and acceptance. They’re easy subjects to understand but hard to grasp fully.”

When Forge approaches an album, he has his rock head on. But lately, he’s been intrigued by the sliding nature of pop music. Encouraged by a crew of close friends who are pop mixers, the metalhead has been dabbling in the world of beats and new styles of production. “When you make rock records, everything is about how heavy the guitars are and how big the drums sound,” he explains.

Enthralled by the flexibility and diversity of pop music, the singer found a new scope of sound that could inform Ghost’s dynamic palette. “In the pop world, it’s different because there are no hard rules. The ensemble in pop doesn’t have to be drums, bass and two guitars,” he adds. “Most of my collaborators work professionally within the pop world. There’s this great marriage that we have where I get to curate a lot of the rock aspects of the music because it’s sort of technically my thing, whereas they are my sparring partners when it comes to the entertainment. Enthuse me! Make my mind [get] blown away.”

Now, if you go online, you’ll read plenty of things about Ghost — rumours of satanism, blasphemy and allegedly corrupt lyrics. It’s no secret that the nearly 20-year-old band has a shtick to uphold, one that pulls on religious inspiration and has a knack for very dead, sensationalised characters. So, you can imagine the feedback when they dropped their full-throttle new single ‘Satanized’ in early March. What do years of being tagged a devil worshipper do to a musician? “I’ve learned through practice to [deal with it]. Throughout my Ghost career, there have been annoying misunderstandings and misconceptions about the whole concept of the band, but that plays into the whole concept of what I’m writing about — the clash between realities,” Forge says.

However, the musician wants to make one thing clear: he doesn’t condone violence. “If a song is called ‘Satanized’, it’s not about being possessed. ‘Satanized’ is a song about being in love, and how it feels being possessed by a demon, if you’re religious. It’s about being overtaken by this force that makes you unable to control yourself as if there’s some other creature inside of you that’s dictating your body and mind. It is very much like a demonic possession. I’m not talking about Ghost fans, but if people think it’s about actual possession, it’s not a problem unless they get violent. I’m writing songs to entertain you, and if you feel like that song is about something else, that’s cool.”

The scrutanised lore of Ghost can be a double-edged sword. While audiences can awkwardly misconstrue the dramatic intention of the project’s art, Forge is openly grateful for the many fans (over 7.3 million, according to Spotify) that listen to the band online and turn up to shows. In fact, it’s Ghost’s dedicated fanbase that resulted in the record-setting success of their lore-inspired movie Rite Here Rite Now. So, with a new album out and a tour on the way, Ghost have set a new project in motion, one dedicated to die-hard fans — a graphic novel. “If I had all the time in the world and no economic hindrances whatsoever, it might have been cool to just expand on that story in film format. So, in the film, we’re alluding to what we call the episodes, and that was a parallel reality that goes alongside the band, which has been going on for a while. Now, that has been developed into a graphic novel.”

In a way, Ghost’s upcoming novel feels like a secret, like a rare expansion-pack map you buy in a video game. It is tailored to the interests of the fans because Forge wanted to create something that resonated with the group’s listeners and connected with them through a different medium than music. “A lot of our fans are into comic books, and I think even some fans have made their own, but now we are finally making ours. This one will be telling the story about Sister Imperator and where she comes from,” he says.

In that way, the graphic novel adds yet another layer to Ghost’s new, expanding world. “I think that deepens the understanding of the human aspects of what I was explaining in the album. The graphic novel also has quite a large slew of darkness and trauma in it, so in that sense, it’s also very human, which I think is important for a holistic understanding of how I regard the world.”

Taken from the current issue of Rolling Stone UK. You can buy it here.