As Ghost unleash brilliant sixth album Skeletá and their accompanying Skeletour, the Swedish sensations are enjoying life at the very top. And it’s giving Tobias Forge reason to reflect – both at the state of the world the band are taking over, and his own place within it. Make no bone about it: he’s here to make a stand…
Lights? Blinding. Pyro? Sizzling. Shamelessly Judas Priest-indebted Grucifix hovering above the stage? Stupidly big. Mummy Dust? Everywhere. 23,000 people? Completely enraptured.
Five days before Easter Sunday, inside Manchester’s sprawling AO Arena there’s an even more important resurrection happening. Eighteen months since they last stepped offstage, Ghost are making one of 2025’s most anticipated returns, kicking off their global Skeletour jaunt, appropriately enough, in the city’s Cathedral district. Whatever we knew, or thought we knew, about Ghost before, it appears we have vastly, vastly underestimated them.
It’s hard to know where to look. Almost every song has a change of staging that’s jaw-dropping in both its scale and imagination. There is a grand cathedral. There is Hell. There is a moment when they head into the endless celestial aether of the Heavens. From the front, it looks like the cover of Meliora brought to life. What permanent fixtures there are onstage – platforms for the band of Nameless Ghouls that has now swelled to eight musicians – are delightfully macabre things of bone and skull, or apparently from a future in which spaceship parts are made of light. The only reason one can think for them not actually walking on water as well is that it would mess with the extra power generators each arena requires to handle it all.
Welcome to the sixth book of Ghost. A week after the UK run of this tour – which will later see the band go on to headline no less a jewel than New York’s Madison Square Garden – Skeletá will have finally been released. And with it, a new age for the band will dawn, with a new clergyman at the helm, the masked, metal-handed Papa V Perpetua.
He’s a slicker, smoother head of the family than his predecessors. Where Cardinal Copia had the occasional whiff of comedic awkwardness about him, Perpetua has a glamour built of something more invitingly sinful. As he leads the band through the greatest rock show on the planet right now, casting a delirious spell on the equivalent population of a small town from the second he opens proceedings with a song none of them have heard a note of before (album opener Peacefield), his statement is unambiguous: nice plane of existence, we’ll take it.
Ghost? Unstoppable. The future? Brighter than a thousand suns. Papa V Perpetua? Bigger than Jesus. And whatever comeback that guy had planned for Easter weekend, he never stood a chance of topping this.
Unless you were there, you won’t have seen any of this, of course. Which is just how Tobias Forge – a self-confessed “control guy” – wants it. A no-phone policy for the whole tour means that there’s no spoilers, no detail to over-analyse and get lost in away from the magic moment.
“When I was a kid, you heard about things, and your imagination went all over the place picturing what it must be like,” he explains. “You’d read about Mayhem or Blasphemy, you’d see a couple of pictures and have one interview maybe, and you’d be hungry to go and seek out more. That’s how I became obsessed with all those bands. That’s what I want for Ghost – I want to have that mystery, I want people to really be fascinated about what we’re doing before they see it.”
We join Tobias in a lounge at Soho’s beautifully weird Mandrake Hotel. It’s very Ghost: a place of soft furnishings straight from a house of occult, where the all-seeing eye seems to peep out at you from every corner. Order a drink from the gorgeously appointed bar, and you do so staring at a taxidermied creature that’s part-goat, part-kangaroo, topped with the grand, colourful plumage of a peacock.
This mix of beauty and darkness is apt as a backdrop to talking about Skeletá. As ever with Ghost, the album’s melodic washes – and it features easily the most major-key material they’ve ever written – casts a sinister shadow.
But where 2018’s apocalyptic, vengeful Prequelle was “a survival record” written when Tobias was “not at a great point in my life”, and Impera from 2022 had looked outward, mocking and despairing at a world of increasingly corrupt power, Skeletá finds Tobias picking over his own bones.
“If I go back a year and a half, I had a quick note-to-self that just said: ‘Introspection record.’ It was not going to be Impera II with a lot of extra bombardment. Instead of shining a light onto something that was an error, it was going to shine a light onto your innards and your soul.
“When I made Impera, I was feeling very good. I was in a good state. I had no real problems in life, and I was generally quite happy, quite content with life. However, as an aficionado of politics and worldwide affairs, [things in that area] were obviously a shit-show. So that made Impera what it was, because it was me reflecting on what I saw was bad.”
Coming in to write Skeletá after two years on the road doing Ghost’s biggest shows to date, including their debut turn at London’s The O2, and a headlining slot on Download’s second stage that had people struggling to fit into the field, Tobias was “exhausted”. This he could handle – indeed, as well as making a record, he took on the extra weight of working on Ghost’s Rite Here Rite Now concert movie, which he sums up with a chuckle, “I don’t need to do that again.” But the weariness with the world was playing on his mind.
He wasn’t where he was in 2017 that precipitated the lashing out on Prequelle, but still in an odd place. What the world didn’t need, he decided, was another Impera, pointing out the wrongs, taking a deep bath in the sins of the powerful and crooked.
“What I needed was a healing record that was gonna comfort people and myself, rather than just explaining all the things that are messed up. We all know that.”
Musically, Tobias found himself going to a place where there was a more innocent notion of where humans might end up in the future. Similar to the utopia of Meliora, in some ways, he looked to elements of the futurism of his youth.
“As a guide, I used two albums that came out in the early-’80s, around the time I was born – Blue Öyster Cult’s Fire Of Unknown Origin, and Abominog by Uriah Heep. They were both quite a long way into their careers at the time, and by the early 1980s they were seen as older guys. They started going, ‘Well, the kids are into these funny keyboards. Let’s try that, and maybe a drum machine.’ It has that ‘laser sound’, but kind of struggling with it. It sounds like the future. I wanted some of that. Not this shitty future that we live in, the ’80s idea of the future.”
Part of the healing and comfort of which Tobias speaks focuses on impermanence. The march of time is brutal, the scythe’s swing remorseless, but this also guarantees perpetual forward motion. History, as the Roman scholar and philosopher Boethius declared, is a wheel: ‘Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it is also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away.’
“I want people to realise that all these things that we’re experiencing right now, all these things that we find super-alarming, they will be history one day, probably not within too long,” Tobias says, pointing to the shared madness of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as an example. “What we’re experiencing is two 70-plus men who are fighting for their lives because they are dying, and they want to make everybody believe that if their world ends, your world ends. They are absolutely, completely unable to realise that this is not the case, because they’re narcissists, and that means that you think you’re the only living person, everybody else is just an object.”
And so the end of a chapter isn’t ever the end of the whole story. There is always more to come.
“I know it’s troubling, but these things will be over,” he continues. “The war will end. There will be a time after that. It’s very important that we try to not give up on the idea that we’re supposed to be functioning humans who are progressive, and try to do more good things than bad and try to make ourselves as good as possible, because we have a tons of years left together – we need to continue living in a society and make new little citizens.
“I also understand that in order for us to handle the end of a war and the demise of these two absolute dickheads, sooner or later, we need to start taking care of each other, and understand that everybody has very similar needs. When you meet people at a personal level, most people have that spark where they can see clearly, and where they can feel what’s right and wrong. But in a group, and en masse, that’s very, very difficult.”
Is this self-reflection, then, partly wondering where you yourself fit into all this? You do, after all, live an odd life, as a successful touring musician.
“I am struggling with all these things, too,” comes the answer. “I am also trying to be a better man, better person, better human. I am extremely worried about everything that’s going on right now, rightfully so. It’s bad stuff, but I really believe that people should have just a tad more belief in humanity.
“Look,” he chuckles, “I’m a misanthrope, I hate people, but I also believe in miracles. I believe that people have an inherent inner power, and I think that what the world needs going forward is also a great deal of compassion.”
Part of the humanity Tobias wants to express is knowing that the passage of time, the roll into the next scene, can be difficult. As well as revelling in the end of the bad times, so too can it be hard to leave more loved things in the past when they can’t follow you into the future.
“Anything that’s urgent and anything that feels traumatic feels like this cataclysmic event that will somehow be a status quo,” he says. “When someone breaks up with you, it feels like the end of the world. And half a year later, it doesn’t feel like that. If someone dies, it feels like, ‘How can I ever continue living?’ That might be the feeling. And then, lo and behold, after a while, it’s completely doable. Something that you couldn’t speak of in the beginning is something that you can joke about later. But that doesn’t mean that it disappears. It doesn’t mean that you weren’t hurt. It just means that we’re built to be able to hurt.
“Nothing is ever eternal. There is no such thing, except for eternity. That’s the only thing that is eternal.”
This self-reflection and plunge into a more human place highlights, by no means for the first time, Ghost’s most curious characteristic.
In one corner, you have the image and mystery, the active efforts to keep one of the biggest tours of the year in venues and not all over YouTube so that the audience experience it as intended. The lead up to Skeletá saw the tour announced with the album title redacted and bleeped out – the result of several different rollouts working at once, but this only played into the intrigue. The band’s new look (steampunk, retro-futurism, magicians, glittering skeletons, veils that bring to mind the Bene Gesserit from Dune) and the arrival of Papa V Perpetua has been a masterclass in tease.
In the opposing house, everyone knows what Tobias looks like now. Indeed, he’s even appeared on the cover of Kerrang!, clutching his K! Award, in civvies. Where once interviews were conducted principally by the disembodied voice of a Nameless Ghoul over a telephone line, or in person with a hooded figure who could as easily have been Tobias as Some Guy, today he greets Kerrang! in a Kreator shirt and jeans. And yet the stuff around Ghost remains rigid and intact.
“It’s weird,” he admits, “but our fans know what’s important to them, and that’s where we put all the creativity and the lore. It was very hard keeping myself hidden all those years. And then when everyone saw who I was, the whole thing didn’t collapse. It didn’t matter – everything around the band was so strong.”
It has, though, also afforded Tobias a rare luxury not often experienced by people who do such good business as he. At home in Stockholm, he says he is “a B, C celebrity at most”. The fact that he is more of “an underground guy” – as evidenced by his choice of shirts, exhaustive knowledge of old death metal, and picking cult bands like Chilean thrashers Pentagram and Italian occult metallers Death SS as supports – with a preference to keeping to himself, means that when the mask’s off, he can slip, relatively, into the shadows.
“Where I live would give you some insight into my stature,” he says. “It used to be the working class part of Stockholm, 100 years ago. Nowadays it’s quite affluent. But it’s the arty place where you have musicians and artists everywhere. I live right next door to [Vikings and Oppenheimer actor] Gustaf Skarsgård, and all around actors and TV people that are way more known than I am. I’m not that.
“That is absolutely superb for me. I can’t believe how lucky I am, but one thing I’m also very happy about is the fact that I managed to become successful doing what I do in a band that’s way more known than I am. As a kid, I had this big idea that being famous is going to open up a big, luscious castle of debauchery that’s gonna make my life fantastic. Somehow I thought if you’re a known musician then only cute girls will talk to you. I now know there’s a lot more dudes. As I have been able to step in and out of celebrity-dom, I’ve really come to cherish the fact that I am not a very well-known person, because it can be claustrophobic.”
If Tobias Forge is a somewhat reluctant celebrity – although within his own flock, he is very happy – he’s also a stunningly ambitious one. He’s also a man who will work himself beyond exhaustion to see an idea fulfilled to its potential. When he realised early on that Ghost was already outgrowing his expectation of “a thousand people in the underground”, he took on the work as much as he did the rewards.
This is how you end up with something like the Skeletour. It’s not just bigger with a few more flames, it’s a creative triumph in and of itself. As a reveal of Ghost’s new chapter, it is a magnificent curtain-up, one that, with all its ‘holy shit’ moments kept in secrecy and well-tended mystique outside the venue doors, is a similarly fascinating thing to seeing KISS in the ’70s.
“Yes, that’s what I want!” he agrees. “I want that thing of going, ‘What the hell must this be like?’ when you hear about it, and your imagination throwing up all these images. That’s what’s cool.”
It’s also a massive statement of where Ghost are: one of the biggest and most significant acts of their time. Arguably, they are next in line to Metallica and Iron Maiden in metal’s lineage of royalty.
Skeletá? Brilliant. Tobias Forge? Eye on the prize. Skeletour? The greatest show on Earth.
This feature originally appeared in the special edition Kerrang! Presents Ghost magazine
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