Swedish rockers Ghost released a new album, “Impera,” earlier this year. The album sold 70,000 copies in its first week and debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 marking the band’s third top 10 album. Earlier this month the band scored a Top 40 single with their 2019 song “Mary On A Cross” after a TikTok user used a slowed-down version of the song to accompany a video about the Netflix hit, “Stranger Things.” The band would go on to release an official slowed-down version of the tune.
Ghost frontman Tobias Forge recently spoke with “Elliot In The Morning” about how he feels about online haters and if it makes him angry to see critical comments of the band. “No, definitely not angry,” he said. “That is not my problem, really. I don’t have a problem with people having a problem with it.”
“If I wanna be the most super-positive person ever and just see everything from a half-full perspective, it’s, like, a lot of… Most things today [are] measured by activity — Spotify activity, online activity, whatever — as opposed to 30 years ago when it was sales; one record sold was one unit and that was counted,” he continued. “But nowadays everything is about content and activity. “One thing that people — especially those who aren’t really chatting about how good they think we are but how bad they think we are, that adds to the activity. So it’s actually a good thing. [Laughs] So keep on talking. It’s all good. It’s all fun.”
Last month, Forge told Consequence that the follow-up to “Impera” will be a change of pace for the band. “I have an album in my head right now that I think is going to be different from the one I just made,” he said. “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.”
“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.”
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