Not even COVID could stand in the way of Ghost as they passed their 10th birthday. Catching up on tour just before the plague hit, we found a rock band now comfortably sitting as one of the most important of their time. As Impera took on the weird world into which it was released, the idea of them being “the next KISS or Maiden” wasn’t a hope: it was happening right in front of us…
On September 19, 2019, Kerrang! headed to Seattle to join Ghost on the North American leg of their Ultimate Tour Named Death.
It was several hours before a sold-out performance at the city’s WaMu Theater, featuring the most complete realisation of the band’s live show to date: huge stained glass window backdrops, lofty risers, spectacular lighting and cannons to shower the 5,000 attendees with confetti – all transported by several trucks and facilitated by a crew of 40.
It would be several hours, too, until Cardinal Copia’s sudden appearance in a blood red suit, his approach silent, before shadow boxing and dabbing his way through a pre-show warm-up – his persona a million miles from that of the man behind the mask.
Towards the end of an unusually unguarded chat with Tobias Forge that same day, covering childhood, his often-exacting nature, and the evolution of the band’s narrative, talk turned to album number five and what could be expected from it.
In explaining his vision, Tobias, sitting in a rather chilly rehearsal room, mentioned Metallica. The metal legends, along with Iron Maiden, had long provided him with the blueprint for how a successful band should operate – by writing great songs and albums, producing plentiful merch with a striking aesthetic, and touring America as much as possible. Tobias was no longer discussing Metallica in the abstract by that stage, though. They were peers and pals.
In truth, James Hetfield had been a believer in Ghost since Opus Eponymous, having been spotted wearing one of their T-shirts as early as 2011, and would champion the Swedes at every opportunity, describing them in an interview at the time as “a breath of fresh air for metal”. Papa Het was even in attendance at Ghost’s first show in Metallica’s native San Francisco, at the 250-cap Bottom Of The Hill venue, in early 2012.
Fast-forward to the summer of 2019, and Ghost were the guests of Metallica on the latter’s WorldWired Tour, which included a show in front of 82,000 people at Twickenham, traditionally the home of English rugby. K!’s review paid particular attention to Cardinal Copia’s ability with an audience, as well as his smutty patter. Noting that while he ‘sounds like Austin Powers baddie Goldmember when asking the crowd if they want their “taints tickled”’, writer Nick Ruskell also observed that ‘he’s one of the finest ringmasters in modern rock’.
“I regard Metallica as colleagues and friends now, but they are still Metallica,” Tobias would reflect three months later in Seattle, acknowledging his place in metal’s pecking order. “I am an ambassador, and they are presidents.”
Tobias ended up putting that ambassadorial role into practice when Ghost covered Enter Sandman on The Metallica Blacklist, a 2021 tribute album that saw huge acts including Weezer, Biffy Clyro and Corey Taylor covering multiple versions of each of the 12 tracks from 1991’s The Black Album. Ghost had first tackled Metallica’s most famous song in front of the thrash legends at a Swedish awards ceremony in 2018. While the track had been selected on Ghost’s behalf, they were given the choice to pick another. The fact that they didn’t back down from such a gutsy choice was testament to their ongoing fearlessness.
On album number five, then, Tobias would do what Metallica did on The Black Album – though symbolically, rather than musically.
“It’s two different things,” he clarified. “What the record sounds like, and knowing to put yourself in the right spot at the right time.” In short: it was time to take a giant commercial leap.
Unfortunately, 15 months on from that chat in Seattle came the first cases of COVID-19. The music industry was hit hard. Ghost’s touring schedule thankfully wasn’t affected, having completed their only show of 2020 in Mexico City on March 3. The pandemic had, however, scuppered plans to enter the studio and make Impera with Klas Åhlund, Meliora’s producer, in 2020 for a 2021 release.
“I remember talking to Tobias in 2019 on their arena tour just before the pandemic, and him mapping out the next tour,” reveals promoter and Download booker Kamran Haq. “He told me where he wanted the tour to start and finish, and how many dates there would be. If it hadn’t been for the pandemic, it would have all happened as he said, but everything got shifted back a couple of years. I’ve never known someone in a band to be so hands-on with stuff like that.”
What that kind of attention to detail gets you was evident when Ghost made their long-awaited return to the UK in May 2022, which included a stop at The O2 in London. With a crowd of 20,000, it was their biggest headline show to date, sporting a production of operatic proportions.
For all the fire and confetti cannons, Papa Emeritus IV in bat wings and the Ghouls dressed like cyberpunk soldiers, there was gratitude and heart with the histrionics.
“Those who are still afraid of going out but have made it tonight, thank you,” said Papa at the show’s climax.
Given that appreciation, Tobias had strong feelings about the negative actions the pandemic had elicited in other artists. In the midst of that same tour, he appeared on the Drinks With Johnny podcast, hosted by Avenged Sevenfold bassist Johnny Christ. During the chat, Tobias didn’t mince words about his belief that some bands used COVID as an excuse to continue cancelling tours when they weren’t happy with the bottom line.
“[These bands] don’t go out and say, ‘We’re not making as much money as we wish, so we’re going to cancel, or we’re going to postpone, until the stars are aligned, and the marketplace looks better.’ They go out and say, ‘Oh, because of safety concerns, we’re not touring,’” said Tobias. “That is a fucking horrible message to the crowd.”
Fittingly, when the time came to work on album number five, the topic of greed was high on the agenda. The notion dated back to 2013, and another trip to Seattle, when Tobias found himself in a bookshop where he came across a copy of The Rule Of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, And Why They Always Fall by Timothy Parsons. The book inspired him to think about the state of the world, of the gulf between the filthy rich and the dirt poor, and how unrest can cause empires to fall and new ones to rise in their place.
“Maybe we have the foundation of a society that could remain for some time and function,” Tobias mused ahead of the album’s release. “But unfortunately, if you look through history, there’s a natural cycle where a society is built up, and then it’s sort of perfected, perfected, perfected. And then it usually falls apart. Even the ones that are dictatorships, they also crumble.
“Everywhere where there’s a dictator, and everywhere where there’s the system, it usually falls apart after a while because people always want to build where they’re standing. And any tower that gets too big or too high, it falls over. That’s the cycle of things.
“So, in a way, you have to destroy to rebuild. But that doesn’t mean necessarily that you have to level everything into gravel.”
During this interview, he said that the album’s Victorian themes were representative of times of change. He also took shots at former Trump Vice President Mike Pence as he explained the track Griftwood.
“That song’s about him and anyone like him who’s willing to soil everything they’ve worked for. They definitely qualify for a front-row ticket to Hell. Which is so ironic, because that’s what they believe in. People like that completely demean themselves, and just eat shit out of someone’s ass in order to achieve whatever they’re trying to achieve.”
Ghost, it appeared, had gone political. Elsewhere, he was continuing to branch out even further creatively. An avid viewer of documentaries, years earlier Tobias had watched one about a Brazilian rapper, shown performing in a favela. Tobias was fascinated by the way in which the aggressive delivery paired with an undulating beat, and how the music galvanised the crowd gathered around, their bodies lurching. He therefore committed himself to writing something that would elicit a similarly excited response.
The result was Twenties, which Tobias would come to describe as “Slayer meets Missy Elliott”. Powered by brass, incessant riffs and double kick drum, it was something of an outlier on the finished record, but refreshingly so. The Twenties of the title referred, of course, to the 1920s, an egregious example of boom and bust, with Tobias’ lyrics juxtaposing decadence (‘We’ll be grinding in a pile of moolah’) and hissed disdain (‘Listen up, you motherfuckers’).
“That song has super-aggressive lyrics, it’s very hostile,” he explained. “It’s still meant as a pep-talk, but it’s basically demeaning and openly hating anyone who’s listening. It promises only air, but poisoned air. And yet it still wraps it up as a gift, as something you should say ‘thank you’ for. Which is like a lot of the bullshit that we’ve been seeing over the past couple of years.”
As if to illustrate the passing of the generations, the track featured another appearance on a Ghost record from Minou Forge, Tobias’ daughter, who’d previously added vocals to Rats on Prequelle, and this time contributed to the Twenties’ eerie choral refrain.
Her father’s drive to make Impera Ghost’s biggest musical statement yet was driven not just by his original motivators, childhood dreams and a desire to emulate musical heroes, but as a justification to his family. Despite likening his relationship with touring to a sailor’s draw to the sea, on the road Tobias desperately missed his wife, Boel – the woman who was by his side back when he worked in a call centre and lived in a tiny apartment with a leaking roof – as well as his twin children, Minou and her brother Morris.
“I’m responsible for showing my wife and my kids that all these years of waiting for me have been worth it,” Tobias said. “And that goes beyond money, because at the end of the day that’s just seasoning. One day my kids will be grown-up, and I have to be able to show them that all this time playing rock shows had a real purpose.”
Other tracks offered simpler pleasures. Call Me Little Sunshine was the first song written for the record, having been demoed as far back as 2018. With its gradual intro reminiscent of The Black Album, and gently sinister lyrics that detailed satanic seduction, it had echoes of Cirice from Meliora. Despite its similarities with what had come before, Call Me Little Sunshine has gone on to accrue more than 110 million streams on Spotify.
Then there was Hunter’s Moon. The second song to emerge, its energy a deliberate counterpoint to Call Me Little Sunshine’s slower pace, it was selected as the album’s lead single and released on September 30, 2021. That was some six months ahead of the emergence of its parent album, to coincide with Halloween Kills hitting cinemas – the 12th instalment in the horror franchise, which featured an edited version over the film’s end credits.
As someone who’d grown up on a diet of scary movies, counting The Exorcist, The Omen and John Carpenter’s original Halloween among his favourites, there was an obvious thrill for Tobias in having a tie-in with the blockbuster. Much like slasher movies, power ballads were big in the ’80s and well represented on Impera in the form of Darkness At The Heart Of My Love and Respite On The Spitalfields, as noted in Kerrang!’s review of the record.
Impera was hailed as a consummate Ghost album upon release, its strength coming from its super-serving of their hallmarks. Or, as our review put it: “All of these elements – the epic, the retro, the riffy, the lyrically iffy – are key ingredients of Ghost, and their better albums are those that give sufficient time and space to them all. For that reason and more, Impera is among Ghost’s very best and sure to push them even closer to those heavenly heights.”
That ascent was furthered by their headline slot on the Opus Stage at Download 2023. It felt like the culmination of all of the band’s efforts to date, reflected in the droves that turned out for them that evening.
“You couldn’t get anywhere near the stage,” remembers Kamran Haq of the scene. “I’d never witnessed that many people on the second stage before. It felt like the perfect moment for Ghost, as it had been a beautiful Sunday up until then, but suddenly the clouds darkened, which perfectly set the tone for what was a fucking killer show.”
For Kamran, Ghost represent nothing less than the new dominant force in rock.
“Ghost are going to be the next KISS and Maiden,” he says. “We need new headliners to come through and Ghost are the next breed.”
Empires fall? For once, the old adage looks totally wrong.
This feature originally appeared in the special edition Kerrang! Presents Ghost magazine
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