In a recent interview with Rolling Stone UK, Ghost‘s Tobias Forge, the band’s singer and main songwriter, discussed his role as the leader of the Swedish occult rock group.
“If you want to be super pragmatic, I’m technically a solo artist,” he said. “I don’t have to think in terms of a group, but everybody needs to understand that my job is a group effort.
“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.”
n April 2017, four former GHOST members filed a lawsuit in Linköping, Sweden, alleging Tobias Forge withheld their share of album and tour profits. They claimed sole control by Forge and a breached partnership agreement. After a six-day trial, the court dismissed the case in October 2018, ordering the plaintiffs to pay Forge’s legal fees, roughly $146,000.
Ghost will release their album, Skeletá, on April 25th via Loma Vista Recordings. The album’s first single, “Satanized,” is already available.
“Satanized” is described in a press release as “an avalanche of infectious hooks and harmonies is buoyed by a hypnotic shuffle, as the narrator succumbs to dark forces within and without, helplessly acknowledging their own blasphemy and heresy as it inexorably consumes them.” By the time the song’s opening lines “There is something inside me and they don’t know if there is a cure” have moved from the inner monologue of the possessed to the ears of the hapless listener, it will already be too late: You will have been “Satanized”.
