Ghost leader Tobias Forge to Chaoszine: “All empires will fall and we know which one is going to be the next one”

Swedish occult rockers Ghost will be releasing their fifth album “Impera” on March 11th and will hold a special record-release event, dubbed “Live From The Ministry”, this Thursday, March 10 at 2 p.m. EST on their YouTube channel.

According to a press release, “Impera” “finds Ghost transported literally hundreds of years forward from the 14th century Europe Black Plague era” of its previous album, 2018’s “Prequelle”. “The result is the most ambitious and lyrically incisive entry in the Ghost canon: Over the course of ‘Impera”s 12-song cycle, empires rise and fall, would-be messiahs ply their hype (financial and spiritual alike), prophecies are foretold as the skies fill with celestial bodies divine and man-made… All in all, the most current and topical Ghost subject matter to date is set against a hypnotic and darkly colorful melodic backdrop making ‘Impera’ a listen like no other — yet unmistakably, quintessentially Ghost.”

Chaoszine had the possibility to sat down with Tobias Forge before Ghost’s headline show at Fair Park Coliseum in Dallas, Texas to discuss about ongoing tour and about the process of making the band’s fifth opus “Impera”. You can read the entire interview below:

Hello Tobias and thanks for taking time to do this interview with us. How has the current US tour with Volbeat and Twin Temple been so far?

Tobias Forge: It’s been nice, especially because in the beginning of the tour we were uncertain as to if this tour would happen in the first place. And now we’re almost there. We’re almost at the end. So it feels like a big victory from that point of view because there aren’t a whole lot of other tours out there. And I don’t know if it was something else shining down or something. There are very few tours going at the time. But on the other hand, it’s also affected people’s resistance to go to shows. People are very afraid. I think it’s loosening up. But in the beginning of the tour, there was a lot of people not showing up, even people that bought tickets. So you would see in the morning it’s like 7,000 tickets sold. And in the end of the night, it said 6,200. 800 people didn’t show up.

I guess some people are still afraid of getting COVID-19 or then they just aren’t vaccinated.

Tobias Forge: Yeah. People don’t want to show vaccine cards because they haven’t gotten vaccinated, or people that are vaccinated are afraid of being out among that type of persons. You see the result of this pandemic not only being of medicinal art. It’s also mental. And it’s also about conflict, which is sad.

During this tour you have played already two songs live from the upcoming “Impera” album. What have been the fans reactions towards the new songs live, and have they worked out as well live as you expected them to work?

Tobias Forge: People react well to “Hunter’s Moon” because they know about that track. That they know the song. It’s been out for half a year. “Kaisarion” is a little bit harder for people to react to because we open the show with it, but we’re used to that. We’ve done that ever since– I think we started with that already in “Infestissumam”. We opened up with “Per Aspera”, and people hadn’t heard that. And then we did the same thing with “Spirit”, and people hadn’t heard that. And I think we even did that with “Rats”. I am used to the fact that the first song from the upcoming album is going to start the cycle for the album.

We are doing this interview because you will be releasing the next Ghost album, “Impera”, on March 11. What kind of process it was for you to make this album? And did the pandemic time somehow affected the process, or was it a normal one for you overall?

Tobias Forge: It was abnormal but not negatively. So it was more practical problems than mental if you will. Originally, I was supposed to record immediately after we were done with the previous tour. So we had our last show in Mexico on

March 3rd, and I was supposed to go into the studio immediately after that and just start demoing, and then we were going to record in the summer. And then the record was going to come out maybe at Christmas or something like that or in the beginning of 2021. And as that changed, I just figured that I’m going to have some time off instead. And I had been away from my family for almost 10 years, so I felt it was a good time to actually spend time with my family and be home.

You said in a recent interview that you’re a bit of dictator and control freak yourself. Do you see it as a positive thing, or is it a negative thing for you in the creative process?

Tobias Forge: As a leader of a band and a leader of a project and the owner of it, I see no problem with that. It’s just more to know when not to be a dictator when it comes to normal life. As a control freak and a dictator, you want to be able to sort of go in and out of that role, ideally, because there are social aspects of your life where it’s not very nice to be like that, and I’m working on it as everyone else. But also, the people that have called me dictator aren’t necessarily people that has the right to say so. They just called me dictator because they weren’t allowed to have a say. I like working together with people, but I like to choose myself when to work with people and whom to work with. That’s not always something that people who are rejected feel is a good thing. When you choose people to work with, it’s the same thing as the girls at the dance. Just because they reject someone to kiss them doesn’t mean that they’re an evil person. It just means that they don´t want to kiss that guy.

It makes sense.

Tobias Forge: And it’s the same thing with working together. I choose who I want to work with and when and that turns you into a dictator because you have the right to choose.

It makes sense. You worked on the album with Opeth’s Fredrik Akesson. Was it more relaxed process to make the album with him, and what was his role in the process?

Tobias Forge: His role in the process was to come in and basically redo all of the guitars. I had, throughout the demoing process, recorded everything. But when all of the projects within the computer was sort of transferred into the new

computer where we’re going to record the record, all of those guitar channels needs to be redone because you’d have a recording in a song where I might have recorded this part in one month in 2020, and the next part might be two weeks ago, and the next bit in October, and they are done incomplete. So if you listen to the demos it sounds very strange. So in order to make that into the record, all of those guitars needs to be played again with perfectly tuned guitars, new strings all of the time. And so it takes 8 hours, 10 hours every day to just sit and redo all of those tracks. And in order for me to focus on the drums, singing, playing bass, producing, I needed someone to come in and just do that job and Fredrik did that fantastically.

You always try to think outside of kind of box when it comes to the lyrics and the music. Does it become harder and harder with each album for you? Was it more difficult to start the creative process for “Impera” because of that?

Tobias Forge: Some aspects become harder and harder and some aspects becomes easier. It’s easier to motivate why you want to make a record, and you go in with an ambition to do something in a different way than you did the last time.

Every process has its faults that you know when you’re done. Like, “I could’ve done that so much better. That was not a good idea. It took this much time or it cost this much money, and it ended up being nothing.” They’re always a bunch of those things after making any record that motivates me to make another. I want to make it better. I want to make the process easier. I want to make the process more fun. I want to work with certain people. I like surrounding myself with as positive of people as possible and nice people that I like hanging out with to try to turn the recording into a very nice experience. So you can always adjust things. It’s gotten better and better. I’m going to say that the recording this album was overall very, very, very chill. It was very nice. Nice vibes and all that. The previous one as well. And then it goes a little south before that. Every time you try to write a new record, there’s always the roadblocks that makes it harder to a certain degree because I don’t want to repeat myself. I try not to repeat myself.

You said that during last summer, you got sort of bored to the new album after being too much involved with it. Has it happened with every album, and how do you normally overcome it?

Tobias Forge: It happens every time, and it just happens at different points. Usually, I get that feeling around the time when we’re mixing or when I get the test press. That’s usually when I don’t hear it anymore. And this time it happened about three weeks before we were done. I just came in one morning and just felt like when you’re not in love anymore. It just ended.

How do you overcome that?

Tobias Forge: You just have to go through that period and I have to believe that all my decisions up until yesterday was the right ones because now I don’t know anymore. I don’t even like it. So as far as I’m concerned, you can erase it, but I can’t afford that. So we need to stick with the program and stick with it. But then how you overcome it is when the record comes out, when it starts having recipients, that’s when your time at least for me, that’s when I can re-evaluate. When we start playing songs live and when we start rehearsing it and you hear how it comes to life when it’s received by others, that’s when you change a little, luckily.

I must say that my personal favorite from the album after a few spins, is the last track, “Respite on the Spitalfields”. How meaningful last track on the album is for you personally?

Tobias Forge: In this case, I think that that track is so important because it sums up the record. It’s the final scene that tells whatever little storyline there is. And I think it’s important to infuse a little bit of hope in a way. Because as dark and gloomy as that track is and its content, a glimmer of hope of an empire falling doesn’t mean that there’s no more coming afterwards. There’s always something new. There’s always something new rising from the ashes, so. And usually, most empires are built on a positive note. When they fall, that’s usually where it becomes a negative one. Yeah.

I also liked the small intros in the album, “Dominion” and “Bite of Passage”. Is it more difficult to write those precise, more smaller details on the album than making a full song?

Tobias Forge: No. As with the previous reference as well, those are usually little snippets of songs that I intended to write into bigger concepts, but I never really finished them. I never really understood how to turn them into real ideas. So you add them on top of something else and sort of leave them because they’re just nice to listen to. That was the original idea. I could never take it longer. “Bite of Passage” I thought that was going to be the beginning of a song. I thought it was going to be something bigger, but I never figured out how to turn that little haiku into a book. So that’s why you have these small little bits here and there of just notes, basically.

At what point in the writing session you wrote the last track? Is it always the last song you write for the album or can you make it in the middle of the process still knowing this will be the end of the album?

Tobias Forge: Yes. I might not know that’s the end of the album, but I usually feel that quite early what kind of track it is, and that can happen anytime. The same way that you come up with the ending of a film in the middle of a process, and then you have to build your way to the ending unless you’re writing like a crime novel because then you always have to start with the ending in a way because you need to know how it and then you just work your way back to where you want it to start to make it as hard to get to the ending as possible.

You did some changes for the outfits of the ghouls and your outfit for this tour. Will these outfits be on album cycle, or is this sort of transition pace at the moment?

Tobias Forge: This is the album cycle look. We might add or do things with the stage decor and stuff like that during the cycle. But overall, this is the look of this cycle.

What does these new outfits represent to the band?

Tobias Forge: I think that they fit in with sort of the industrial-military look that represents the Imperial vibe that I wanted. I wanted them to look like soldiers but soldiers more associated with modern warfare. In a sense that they look last 100 years warfare basically. Pilots which could drop for example gas from plains for example. It is ironic how imperial times are right now.

Thank you Tobias for the interview and all the best for the rest of the US tour. Anything you want to say as last words for the fans?

Tobias Forge. Thank you for the interview. Looking forward to seeing all the fans out on the road with the upcoming “Impera” album. It feels a bit unreal that now when show’s are returning to normal and we are slowly getting over COVID-19 there is a shitstorm in Ukraine. It feels unbelievable what we are going through at the moment. That will also end someday and all empires will fall. And we know which one is going to be the next one.