Ghost: How Tobias Forge created a genre-redefining monster

Death and rebirth. Lines of succession. The need to expand and elaborate on what’s come before. Even within the enclosed mythos of Ghost, Tobias Forge seems obsessed with the interrogation of how every grand institution is the outcome of its evolution, every great moment the culmination of all those leading up to that point.

He as an artist and Ghost as a band are products of a lifetime immersed in all sorts of gnarly sound. And Papa V Perpetua with his batty acolytes is just the latest grotesque metamorphosis in a musical career dating back more than three decades.

“I had the dream, but I didn’t have the foresight,” Tobias reflected on the collapse of the most promising of his previous outfits, Stockholm death metallers Repugnant, during a 2018 interview with Blabbermouth. “We were picked up by a real label and got a manager and had everyone kept their ducks in a row, I would have loved to [still have] that band. I really wanted to make it a ‘big band’, but I couldn’t. Now, knowing the things that are required – how many stars need to align and all the decisions you have to make – I can definitely look back on my 21-year-old self and see why I didn’t achieve that with Repugnant. I wasn’t mature. I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t there yet.”

But finding his way would be a hell of a lot of fun.

As per a February 2020 rummaging through the archives from School Of Ghoul – Ghost’s online fanzine – and a 1996 interview with printed zine Scriptures Of Malignancy, Tobias began to flex his chops around 1994, in his early teens. Dismissing a slew of “unserious shitbands” he played in around the time (the earliest rumoured collective titled Subterranean Evil) his first serious project was black metal outfit Absurdum, renamed to Superior in 1995. And we mean serious. The photo of young Tobias, going by the stage name Leviathan Forge (amusingly dubbed Don Juan Leviathan in the zine), in full corpsepaint wrapped in bullet belts and clutching a chalice of Lucifer-knows-what crackles with frostbitten purpose, calling to mind legends like Immortal and Mayhem who’d redefined musical evil in the years just before.

Rummage around on YouTube and you’ll find an upload of Superior’s 1996 Metamorphis demo, which along with 1997’s Illustrare ad Infernalii was all they ever released. Lo-fi in the extreme, the recording rattles with primitive intent, but showcases a prodigious feel for catchiness and high drama in even the edgiest sounds. An earlier demo, brilliantly named Anno Dracule (Dark Wampyrious Conspiracy) was also recorded but, er, appropriately never saw the light of day.

Around the time, he also fell in with black metal miscreants Malign. Leaving that band before their first demo dropped in 1995 they get a special mention as they’re still a going concern in 2025, with guitarist Ynas ‘Mörk’ Lindskog even joining up with the mighty Watain between 2001 and 2006.

Tobias’ next venture, Repugnant, materialised in 1998, marking a departure from blackened evil to more abrasive death metal. Growing up in Linköping, Tobias evidently gravitated towards Stockholm’s signature buzzsaw sound pioneered by Nihilist and Carnage, and then popularised globally by Entombed and Unleashed.

“Death metal is darkness with all that comes with it,” is how he would set the scene in an early interview with Hellish Massacre, the legendary Swedish fanzine run by Watain mainman Erik Danielsson. “It is extreme. I wouldn’t say that Repugnant is a direct tribute [to the legends of the Stockholm scene], but through our music and everyday life we pay homage to the ancient days. We celebrate that period of time and do our best to continue in their footsteps. Maybe [we can] even build [onwards from] where others left off… The response has so far been very good. We have no direct complaints. At the time of this interview we’ve just sold out our first load of 150 cassettes!”

Retroactively heralded by many excited fans as leaders of the Swedish death metal revival, Repugnant were really much more of a cult concern. Releasing just two demos – 1999’s Spawn Of Pure Malevolence and 2001’s Draped In Cerecloth – and split EPs with Pentacle and Kaamos before they initially called it a day in 2004, the aforementioned uncertainty and instability might have been part of the thrill but it was ultimately their undoing. Even Tobias’ then-alias Mary Goore, a play on legendary Irish blues guitarist Gary Moore, seemed contextually odd. Maddeningly, their excellent debut LP Epitome Of Darkness only surfaced a couple of years after the break-up, in 2006.

“You’ve got to remember I was only 17 when I formed the band,” Tobias would tell Terrorizer magazine in 2010, after restarting things. “Our initial six-year run was very turbulent. I had to change the line-up three times, the problem being that at the end of the ’90s most musicians were not accustomed to the old ways of death. And I had such a very clear vision: the band had to look a certain way, sound a certain way. I soon became, out of necessity, a dictator. As a result, I was pretty hard on everybody. But the day I lost my fire and will to do this, the ship just sank with me.”

Expanding in a 2022 Guitar World interview, his true feelings about the collapse vividly bled through. “When we called it quits, we felt like such a side note. We didn’t mean anything, except to a few people.” Reforming for their 10th anniversary in late 2008 and again for major festivals like Hell’s Pleasure and Maryland Deathfest in 2010 and 2011, promises were made that it was less a “reunion” than a “continuation”. Somewhat amusingly in hindsight, Tobias insisted that they were “back from the grave for good…”

Mary Goore was a better fit for Crashdïet, anyway. Formed in 2000 parallel to Repugnant’s original run, the underground glam rock outfit was the first real indication of the knack for melody and irreverence that would bear such fruit for Ghost. Although never officially released and available only as unverified bootlegs, the three demos on which Tobias played guitar featured a few hellraising bangers like Cancer Dancer and Queen Obscene. In 2002 he left to focus on Repugnant, but various line-up changes mean that Crashdïet are still around today.

Another band, Onkel Kånkel And His Kånkelbär – translating roughly as Uncle Dingle And His Dingleberries – also called on Tobias’ talents in the early 2000s. A bad-taste punk outfit riffing on various taboo subjects and points of grossness including, charmingly, coprophilia, they weren’t big or particularly clever, and the full extent of Tobias’ involvement has never really been clear. But it’s easy to see their outrageousness refined in Ghost’s more controversy-baiting moments.

Connecting the dots with Subvision is even easier. Without the excellent, albeit surprisingly dialled-back, alt-punk outfit it’s hard to see how we would’ve gotten to Ghost in their initial form. Incepted by Tobias and future Nameless Ghouls Martin Persner and Gustaf Lindström, there was little of the AOR influence that would define their later band. But the mix of jangling chords, surging melodies and deep-flowing bittersweetness of songs like Love Is A Fire and Room 611 – plus Tobias’ inimitable clean vocals – tease the vision beginning to flow from the backs of their minds.

“Crashdïet was something of a therapy project, but it proved that I could be quite puritanical about a certain kind of rock,” Tobias told Swedish-language magazine Soundi in 2022, alluding to a more straight-faced style indebted to bands like The Rolling Stones and The Damned. “I liked glam rock bands like The New York Dolls and Guns N’ Roses. I didn’t care for stuff like Poison and Stryper. So Subvision became a kind of hybrid. It was too metal to become a popular pop-rock band, but it was also too pop and rock to be a proper metal band. We were operating in the middle of it all!”

Three EPs – 2003’s Brilliant Music For Stupid People, the same year’s Pearls For Pigsnawps and 2004’s The Killing Floor – preceded 2006 album So Far So Noir. Unfortunately, they ran out of steam as key members focused their energy elsewhere, finding more freedom in the fantastical.

“I would’ve hated [continuing to play] the music we made in Subvision,” Tobias revealed in Soundi. “I never want to hear any of those songs again. They make me sick. They’re too close to me. Too personal. Ghost has a lot of my own personality, too, but it doesn’t come out the same way.”

By 2006, Ghost were a going concern. But before the congregation had truly begun to swell, Tobias and Martin Persner divided their attention between the shadowy realm of Papa Emeritus and the far more psychedelic world of Magna Carta Cartel. Completing their line-up with another Nameless Ghoul to be, guitarist Simon Söderberg, 2008’s Valiant Visions Dawn EP and 2009’s Goodmorning Restrained LP made for a radiant counterpoint to the shadier sounds Ghost were dragging from the crypt.

That It’s Already Too Late To Leave, for instance, dissolves shoegazey textures into its ambient instrumental sprawl, while Metropolis Flow could be a playfully breezy, gleefully glittery Ghost B-side. But still, as Papa Emeritus found his following, Tobias let Magna Carta Cartel fall to the wayside.

Still, following their 2016 falling out, Martin and Simon reactivated MCC without Tobias, releasing 2017’s The Demon King EP and 2022’s meatier THE DYING OPTION, the credits for which show a couple of songs are final versions of compositions that begun while Tobias was in the band.

Following his own path, Tobias’ last substantial extra-curricular body of work was a planned solo album to be titled Passiflora, referring to the Passifloraceae family of vegetation: Passion Flowers. Although proceedings had gotten as far as record label Kooljunk sending out press releases in March 2008, the album – originally conceived as a second Subvision record – was put on ice.

Passing into legend, a CD bootleg cropped up on Discogs last year and sold for $5,434 (£4,210). Fortunately for those with a little less disposable income, it leaked online in early 2025.

“I was so filled with emotions and creativity,” Tobias told Finland’s Chaoszine of a fascinatingly textural, faintly creepy collection. “I had a real vision for that record, for that band. But it literally didn’t go anywhere. When that happens, when you write a love letter and it just disappears into the void, you try to [quickly] distance yourself from it. That’s what I felt.”

Passiflora feels like the missing link in some ways in one of the most intriguing evolutions in modern music. Moreover, it captures the strident step up in confidence and broadening of the palette that would be spectacularly realised with the addition of make-up and blasphemy, Tobias’ final lesson in the sonic seminary before committing himself fully to the congregation and taking command of a vessel big and bold enough to realise his wildest dreams and darkest desires.

This feature originally appeared in the special edition Kerrang! Presents Ghost magazine

Read this next:

• Ghost: “I’m a misanthrope, I hate people, but I also believe in miracles”
• Ghoul The World: How Ghost catapulted out of the underground with Opus Eponymous
• 13 essential Ghost songs you need to know