Ghost’s Tobias Forge says he’s “allergic to anything that suggests nü-metal”

Don’t ever expect to find nü-metal creeping into the theatrically inclined music of Swedish metal outfit Ghost. The band’s mastermind Tobias Forge recently vented on his distaste for that much maligned genre, which was championed into the mainstream by the likes of Korn, Limp Bizkit and more over two decades ago.

Speaking recently with Metal Injection about his overall taste in metal and how it tends to exclude anything touched by nü-metal, Forge stated:

In a separate recent interview conducted by Mixdown, Forge also spoke of the alienation he felt early in the band’s career amid the metalcore explosion, offering:

A band that I don’t think gets mentioned a lot that’s definitely up my sleeve in terms of what I like would be Negative Plane. Obviously an old band that sort of went a little bit through a resurgence a few years ago was Gorguts. Their “Colored Sands” record was really cool.

My taste is very old school. Ever since like ’94 when nü-metal started to really show its face, I’ve been allergic to anything that suggests nü-metal and unfortunately that has been like the everlasting genre from like ’94 to today.

The bands that I like are usually bands that sound like an ’87 sort of death metal band. Unfortunately. I hate to be negative. But I like a lot of other music. I like a lot of different rock. I’m more open when it comes to that. But when it comes to extreme metal I sort of cap it at ’93 and ’94. After that, everything else is just shit.”

Ghost‘s Tobias Forge

I always felt proud that when we came out, we had a brief invite into the occult rock thing that was happening at that time, and as soon as things started to move for us we were out of that quickly…we started playing with lots of other bands. Once we started touring I felt very alienated because at that point, all these ‘core’ bands with a sentence for a name – they were the shit! I envied the massive amount of opportunities they had because they were all new, current, same age…I’ve always felt like the odd kid…I felt we stuck out like a sore thumb.Ghost‘s Tobias Forge

Forge‘s comments arrive ahead of the band’s forthcoming new album “Impera”, which will see a release next Friday, March 11th. A new single by the name of “Twenties” from that record just debuted online yesterday (March 2, 2022) and can be seen below: