The Swedish hard-rock band GHOST appeared on “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” last month. When the group formed, in Linköping, in 2006, its members were anonymous, and their devotion to Satan was deep and jubilant. On a track from GHOST’s first album, the vocalist Tobias Forge offered up a demonic mandate: “Believe in one God, do we? / Satan almighty.” Since then, GHOST has cooled it a little with the devil worship, though it has not exactly gone soft: the song “Mary on a Cross,” from 2019 (“You go down / Just like Holy Mary”), was decried as blasphemous, and the band’s American tours are still protested by wild-eyed church groups, who encircle venues and wave signs reading “Satan Has NO Rights.” These days, Forge’s identity is known, though he continues to be backed by a rotating cabal of so-called Nameless Ghouls. (There were seven Ghouls hanging out backstage at “The Tonight Show,” dressed in black hoods or top hats, masks, and glittering skeleton suits.)
The band released its sixth studio album, “Skeletá,” this spring; it débuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Ahead of the taping, Forge wore jeans, high-top Converse, and a black leather motorcycle jacket. The night before, GHOST had sold out Madison Square Garden, prompting Forge, who is forty-four, to say, “All these years, that’s been some sort of elusive mirage on the horizon.” (GHOST dedicated the show to Ozzy Osbourne: “For being the Prince of Darkness, he sure gave us a lot of light,” Forge said from the stage.) He felt the same thrill about doing “The Tonight Show.” “I grew up very much in awe of a lot of sixties bands, like the Rolling Stones,” Forge said. “The story of those bands was filtered through these American television appearances. I am very happy that we’re allowed into the ether.”
GHOST is a theatrical and largely tongue-in-cheek outfit. Though the band is spiritually indebted to horror-punk and heavy-metal groups like Iron Maiden and the Misfits, it’s musically more aligned with the riff-rock bands of the seventies, such as Blue Öyster Cult. If you are not prone to pearl-clutching, there is a lot of perverse pleasure in GHOST’s music, which has more than a whiff of Spinal Tap. Even Forge’s gnarliest lyrics are also kind of funny: “The swamp of feces that is the world / Flatulates a whirl windstorm in which you swirl,” he sings on “Depth of Satan’s Eyes,” a cold and sludgy track from the 2013 album “Infestissumam.” If you’ve had a bad enough day, the line can feel like a koan, or at least something cute to send to the group chat. “That’s what we’re trying to do with everything that is GHOST,” Forge said. “Taking all these depressive issues—death, doom, gloom, destruction, oppression—and just turning it into something comprehensible and positive.” In another way, Forge is attempting to meet the world on its own terms. “We’re preaching about the evil on the other side,” he said. “My thirteen-year-old self was this angry Satanist who wanted to blow the world up. But now a lot of that is happening on a completely different level—spreading absolute, total death and destruction and chaos, in order for there to be nothing left.”
After a sound check, Forge disappeared for a couple of hours. GHOST has had a series of front men over the years, all embodied by Forge; the latest is known as Papa V Perpetua, who exists within a complicated family tree of glowering dark priests. (Forge described his onstage persona as a mix of Mick Jagger, Freddie Mercury, and Charlie Chaplin.) Shortly before showtime, Papa emerged from a dressing room wearing black pants, a silver blazer, black leather gloves, and a metallic mask. He confidently strode toward the stage door. One of his eyes had gone milky, deranged. Past iterations of Papa have performed in a demonic papal gown, a towering mitre featuring an inverted cross (when the cross is encircled by the letter “G,” GHOST fans refer to it as “the Grucifix”), and a full silicone mask, which gave his face a Hannibal Lecter stillness. Papa hasn’t gone business casual yet, but his latest outfit is noticeably less restrictive. “Over the years, I’ve developed claustrophobia, which is not ideal,” Forge said. “You see a little bit more of my face, you see a little bit more movement. Some of the obvious creepiness from the very paralyzed masks is technically gone.”
That evening, the band performed “Lachryma,” a single titled after the Latin word for “tears”; a fog machine was pumping. The track is a power ballad about heartache—the way it oozes into every crevice of a life, a creeping, toxic flood. Like many GHOST songs, it is deceptively tender: “Now that sweet’s gone sour / Seeping down the cracks / Getting worse by the hour / The vile rot attacks,” Forge moans. At the end, before Fallon reappeared, all pep and cheer, Forge clasped his hands together and closed his eyes, as if locked in prayer. ♦
