Tobias Forge had long wanted to do an album set in the future. With Meliora, he had the tools and freedom to follow in the footsteps of his heroes in Iron Maiden and make a full-on heavy metal concept record. Within it, he questioned the nature of contentment in a modern world. But its runaway success would also prove to be the making of Ghost…
On March 2, 2016, Ghost headlined the London Palladium. By that time, the band were no strangers to playing in theatres, having done so across the United States. But the storied West End venue has its own place in rock history. In October 1963, The Beatles made a TV appearance on Van Parnell’s Sunday Night At The Palladium, a show which regularly drew 15 million viewers. Such was the screaming hysteria that met The Fab Four, John Lennon can be heard telling the audience to “shut up” so he can introduce their final track, with a post-match analysis that they were so drowned out that the songs “might as well have been us farting”.
Van Parnell is said to have made them stay inside the venue post-show for their own safety. The Mirror headline described how the band had to “flee” from the “fantastic Palladium TV siege”. It was the point at which the frenzy around the band was iconic in its own right: Beatlemania.
It was the perfect venue, then, for Tobias Forge to celebrate Meliora’s blend of spectacle and substance – with the kind of prestigious performance Ghost repeated when they played London’s Royal Albert Hall in 2018.
In his review of the Palladium show, Kerrang! writer Ian Winwood described the moment when Papa Emeritus III disappeared into the darkness, returning minus his usual ceremonial garb – dressed instead in a long jacket, waistcoat and spats, his movements “like Fred Astaire’s disinterred remains”. Despite the somewhat gruesome comparison, Meliora was the moment that Papa became even more mobile and fleet of foot, thereby embodying an album that detached itself from the fixed expectations people had of Ghost and taking them into the future.
Long before Meliora’s genesis, Tobias Forge had wanted to do a futuristic Ghost album – to capture an age where God, seemingly, really was dead. Or, at the very least, dormant to the point of impotence, with society behaving accordingly.
In 2018, the singer recalled his vision, describing “a super-urban record that takes place in a not-traditionally doom environment – no cemeteries or any of that sort of thing. It was supposed to be a record that was infused with the idea of the absence of God.”
Where Infestissumam had been overtly about the presence of The Antichrist, this time around it was arguably a scarier notion: that there is no supreme being watching over us, or out for us. We’re alone, and our fates are our own.
Such heavy ideas were juxtaposed by a slight loosening of the band’s image. In an interview with K! in the summer of 2015, a Nameless Ghoul discussed the need for the figures within Ghost to be flexible, as illustrated by Papa Emeritus III’s more adaptable incarnation.
“Ghost is unlike Steel Panther, who are able to build their characters and stay in character throughout interviews,” the Ghoul explained, perhaps unnecessarily. “They talk about drinking, partying, the Sunset Strip, and that’s their shtick. But for us, talking about religion and the state of mankind is quite serious. Don’t get me wrong, we’re not politicians or anything. But Ghost talks about some things that are very serious.
“As a band, we made a decision at some point that if we were going to stay in character, it would be confusing because what we are trying to do is highlight the absurdity of religion, or linear religion, basically,” the Nameless Ghoul continued. “If we were to stay in character it would be hard to even discuss that because of the paradox that would be there.”
In short, Ghost seemed concerned that the rigidity of their iconography – the chasuble and mitre for Papa, the monk-like hoods for the Nameless Ghouls – might become staid, transforming them into the very thing they offered a critique on.
The Ghouls’ switchover to horned, mouthless masks and fitted suits shook up their established aesthetic, giving them a dynamism and certain sexiness, though Meliora was perhaps not the record they should have made if they didn’t want to be worshipped. Meliora is, after all, Latin for ‘better things’, and eventually earned Ghost GRAMMY Awards in both their native Sweden and America.
For all the talk of Meliora being “futuristic”, apparently born from a Nameless Ghoul stumbling upon a sci-fi sounding riff during rehearsals before touring Infestissumam, it was just as much about bringing things thematically up to date. It was less about being musically modern than it was a commentary on modern life, of our restless pursuit of meaning, and our often misguided idea of what actually constitutes true purpose.
“Most people you meet in life are most content when they have a purpose,” a Nameless Ghoul explained in 2015. “But most people think their purpose is to be a millionaire. Most people think they cannot be content until they’re their own boss at the top of the Trump building. Twenty-five years ago, people were content with being a carpenter. But after the internet, people can now create an app in five minutes and sell it for $5 million. That’s the career choice now. Either that or you can play poker – that’ll make you rich. Or you can photograph your tits and that’ll make you extremely rich. The whole concept of happiness is fucking skewed.”
Tobias was no stranger to having a sense of purpose. As a child whose curriculum was Metallica and Iron Maiden, he’d been quick to dream big, and would often stand outside his home in Linköping looking down the street towards a horizon pregnant with possibility. It was no coincidence, then, that the song Absolution had an autobiographical bent. For all its menacing mentions of the temptations that can come with following our dreams – allusions to sin being one of the band’s trademarks – Absolution nakedly recalled the young Tobias’ unwavering desire to fulfil his purpose. ‘Ever since you were born, you’ve been dying / Every day a little more, you’ve been dying / Dying to reach the setting sun / As a child, with your mind on the horizon / Over corpses to the prize you kept your eyes on / Trying to be the chosen one.’
Meliora’s modern lens was reflected in the band’s choice of producer. Klas Åhlund, once a member of the Swedish indie-rock band Caesars, had worked with some very big names – including Madonna, Britney Spears and Katy Perry – but not a metal band, though he was keen to do so. Ghost, meanwhile, were looking for someone with skills outside of their purview – someone eager to break into that world rather than a known quantity within it, to maximise opportunities to think outside the box.
Dante Bonutto is Director of A&R at Spinefarm Records, which represented Ghost internationally at the time, as Spinefarm and Loma Vista Records both sat within the framework of Universal Music Group. As a KISS fan of long standing, he was naturally drawn to music with a strong theatrical component and multiple layers of meaning.
“For me, it’s just way more exciting like that – the suspension of reality, for a time at least, providing extra opportunities to fire the imagination of the public,” suggests Dante.
“There’s something about Swedish songwriting that seems to allow for melody and muscle to easily co-exist. Whatever the reason, it means that Klas helming the production – a songwriter and musician with a reputation forged on the more commercial side of the tracks – was quite a logical progression, and certainly the material was full of hellishly memorable hooks.”
The bigness of the thinking was reflected in the scale of the creative process. Tobias and Klas would spend three months in pre-production for Meliora, with work taking place in California and Sweden, and a swelling list of personnel involved to keep everything running. Tobias later reflected on Meliora as being “lavish”, both in terms of its scope and the size of the operation, particularly the portion in Stockholm, prompting him to slim down on both when it came time to make its follow-up, Prequelle.
Regardless, the collaboration between Tobias and Klas yielded results, including the most important song of Ghost’s career. Originally, Cirice and Devil Church had been joined together as a doomy nine-minute instrumental, before the decision was made to split them into two separate tracks. Cirice began to take on a life of its own, its plodding but purposeful intro recalling Slayer slowed to a walking pace, its heaviness building as the track progresses. Meanwhile, at the insistence of Klas, a chorus was hurriedly written by Tobias, leaping from him and unlocking the song’s hidden magic.
“Cirice was the first track I heard,” recalls Dante. “It reminded me a bit of AC/DC’s Hells Bells, and it was clear that horns had been honed, pentagrams polished, and more flesh added to the bones; the production came with plenty of heft, big and punchy in all the right places.”
While Cirice dealt with the themes Ghost had become synonymous with – namely the Church’s propensity for seducing vulnerable, damaged souls – it had rarely been encapsulated with such canny beauty (‘I can feel the thunder that’s breaking in your heart / I can see through the scars inside you’).
Cirice would receive a thunderous reception, becoming the song that broke Ghost in America, propelling them into larger venues and their first appearance on U.S. television. On October 30, 2015, two months after Meliora’s release, Ghost performed Cirice on the Halloween episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. The bookish host, dressed in suitably spooky finery and brandishing a copy of the album on vinyl, introduced the band to his two-and-a-half million viewers. And as the performance built to its crescendo, people planted within the audience walked spellbound towards the stage, reaching out for Papa’s healing touch. Quite what the average viewer made of it is anyone’s guess. And that was arguably Meliora’s greatest feat: masking diabolical messages for mass consumption via irresistible tunes.
He Is, for example, remains one of the band’s most gorgeous compositions, despite starting out as a joke between Tobias and his wife, Boel, as a pastiche of the somewhat old-fashioned songs she’d liked when she studied in Italy. Eventually, it stopped being a joke, but for the longest time the band still couldn’t make it sound like a Ghost song, which is why it was originally shelved during the making of Infestissumam.
Similarly, while Mummy Dust was, on the surface, a bombastic slice of disco-doom, the reality was deeper. It wasn’t about the debris that collects on Egyptian tombs, but mankind’s elevation of money to deity status and the evil that engenders. It’s inventive, too, as it’s money that’s addressing the listener (‘You’re the possessee of avarice / I’m the ruler of the earth / I will smother you in riches / ’Til you choke on sordid mirth’).
Either way, Meliora picked up its share of trophies. As well as scooping the Best Hard Rock/Metal Album at the 2015 Grammis, Cirice won a GRAMMY Award the following year for Best Metal Performance, beating Slipknot, Lamb Of God, Sevendust and August Burns Red to the prize.
Such plaudits were meaningful, though less so than Ghost’s higher calling, which they explained to K! ahead of Meliora’s release.
“Ghost want to reflect issues that are relevant,” a Nameless Ghoul explained. “We’ll always piss around. We’ll always have fun. But it’s like that [Ernest Hemingway] quote at the end of the movie Se7en: ‘The world is a fine place and it’s worth fighting for.’ And [like Morgan Freeman] I agree with the last part. The world is a shitty place, but we have to live in it and it’s definitely worth fighting for.”
This feature originally appeared in the special edition Kerrang! Presents Ghost magazine
Read this next:
