A Ghost album starts as a solitary endeavour for bandleader and frontman Tobias Forge. Though his band has become known for its elaborate concepts, following an occultist clergy and Forge himself cycling through multiple figurehead characters, he says the accompanying fictional story isn't on his mind when he writes music.
"When making records, don't really pay too much attention to the lore," he explains. "The lore is external; the lore is the church with its congregation, and when I'm writing music, that's the scriptures that are being sent out to the congregation, if you will."
Forge's band, founded in Linköping, Sweden, have garnered worldwide recognition since being unleashed on the global heavy metal scene with their 2010 debut album. With album number six, Skeletá (due out April 25 through Loma Vista Recordings), Ghost are now bona fide arena headliners, thanks to Forge's creative architecture and theatrical songwriting, the hallmarks of their sound simply being Forge's instinctual style.
"Usually, when I put my hand on a song or I create something, it has a little bit of a DNA, and I guess I have a way to write that might be signature for me," he tells Exclaim! "I always want to write songs that I don't have; I always want to make a record that I've never heard before, albeit influenced by something. But it's actually getting harder and harder."
Writing a new song feels like being a detective solving a homicide, as Forge, nothing if not true to the spirit of his band, puts it. Each case has a new victim, different leads, and perhaps an unexpected culprit.
"You never really learn," Forge says. "I know how to have written that [previous] track, but I don't know how to write this new track. I just have a lot of tricks up my sleeve, but I don't know if that's what we need to make this song fucking awesome."
Forge doesn't want to spill too many details on where the Skeletá cycle will take the accompanying storyline, but he offers a hint as to what awaits fans. The band recently introduced Forge's newest protagonist, Papa V Perpetua, fraternal twin brother of predecessor Papa Emeritus IV, formerly Cardinal Copia, who has been promoted to clergy leadership.
"Let's put it this way: this album is about healing, and healing in combination with hope to become a more solid human to function in a more solid society where we're a little bit more nice to each other and to ourselves," says Forge. "Right now, Cardi is very out of place. And it would be nice if it ended with him feeling better about his position."
Ultimately, though, Forge sees an eventual end to the Ghost lore, looking to a future where music and theatrics take centre stage, admitting he can find it limiting in a way to have to fit his lyrical content into the plot.
"With the risk of sounding like I'm complaining, which I'm not, at points I've found myself envious of bands like Foo Fighters or Pearl Jam, who can just exist," he says. "They can just show up and everyone wants them to do what they're really good at, but the nature of my band has been creatively intuitive, but practically not as intuitive, because it's meant that you always have to create lore that most other bands don't have to. That's obviously a creation of my own — that's my fault, so I'm not complaining."
Fifteen years into his career with Ghost, Forge says the world-building can get laughable at times, but also believes the fantasy components are more exciting now than they were five years ago: "As a storyteller who has ambitions to evolve as a storyteller into different media, it's enthusing," he says. "I like that part."
Skeletá is the sound of Forge's most fully realized vision yet, with infectiously catchy songcraft, equal parts soaring synth leads and diabolical riffing and plenty of Forge's upside-down prophesying. Forge feels that Ghost are past freshman status, considering himself a sophomore or junior of the metal scene now. After carrying the torch for heavy music and reaching levels of success few newer metal bands have achieved in the past decade, Forge sees more life in heavy metal now than he did when Ghost started taking off.
"I've been heartbroken many times over the last 10 or 15 years over bands that quit, died, stopped functioning or disappeared," he says. "I don't want that, but it's just the way of the world."
To keep the live concert circuit alive, Forge says promoters and venues need to have a bank of big-name acts to choose from, enough that festival lineups can feature different headliners year by year. "Metallica can't headline everywhere all the time," he says. "It doesn't work. Ten to 15 years ago, you had a lot more headliners who were good for 40,000 people. In the festival world, you need bands that have a pull."
To Forge, metal may be the only musical style to exist that consistently attracts new generations who embrace the genre's entire history, while still existing outside of the mainstream. "There's this embrace of styles because it seems to be reaching the same people still," he explains. "It's the same outsider in school, the same intellectual comic reader, the same horror buff who starts liking bands. And your gateway in might be through Slipknot, or it might be through Sleep Token now — or Ghost. But it all leads back to all these other bands, so there's this great heritage movement that keeps on spawning new bands."
Ghost's Skeletá tour cycle will see the band embarking on an ambitious global arena trek, aptly dubbed the Skeletour. Having gone through extensive band rehearsals and worked with two collaborators to conceive a larger-than-life stage show, Forge says he is able to give more of his energy to his own performance without the added pressure of being the sole director of a show this size.
"In the band we have a very strong tie to Canada because our bass player is from Toronto, so every time we're in Toronto specifically, that's a semi-homecoming," he says. "There are really no superlatives that don't sound tacky to say how great I think the country is."
Forge has a long list of favourite Canadian bands and artists, from Leonard Cohen and Neil Young to Rush and Danko Jones to Voivod, Slaughter, Sacrifice and Blasphemy. "There's a lot of Canadian music in my life that has been ever-present," he says. "But I'm also a hockey fan, so if I ever have a day off, we try to go see hockey. Because of our Toronto connection, the Maple Leafs would be the go-to team."
Leaving us with a promise to Canadian fans that Ghost will be coming through on the Skeletour — and that it will be during hockey season — the newest era of Ghost is just beginning.
"I wish for it to end with me wanting more," Forge says. "That would be a great achievement."