Ghost frontman Tobias Forge, better known as the many incarnations of Papa Emeritus, isn't trying to hide who he is anymore. Forge gave an unmasked interview last year on Swedish radio after his identity was revealed through a lawsuit from former members, and now he's doing yet another unmasked interview with Revolver. Forge reveals that Ghost has been mixing its currently-untitled fourth album with Andy Wallace (Nirvana, Slayer) after having recorded it with producer Tom Dalgety (Opeth, Royal Blood).
Forge reveals four song titles to Revolver – those being "Rats," "Life Eternal," "Danse Macabre," and "Faith" – and brings up quite a bit throughout the interview that the album's lyrics deal with turning points, death, and a general sense of doom.
"It is loosely themed around the concept of death and doom. It's a themed album around medieval times, but it's definitely clinging onto a lot of very current things. The Black Death [plague] is a great example of a turning point for a whole civilization. Complete villages were annihilated. Most people knew very little, so all of it was God or the Devil — and about their faith being questioned: Why are we being stricken down by this great scourge? It must be because of our not fearing God enough and all this superstitious bullshit.
There's a lot that you would recognize today in online mannerisms. In many ways, we've gone back a few steps because now it's closer to how it was back in the old days when people were standing at the square and all of a sudden, it's like in Monty Python's Life of Brian: 'Stone him! Ra! Ra! Ra!' Public trials are very unsupervised and extremely swift and speak to the most primordial parts of us."
We're also not entirely sure what the new iteration of Ghost is going to look like either. We saw the very, very old and creepy Papa Emeritus Zero at a recent show, but then a teasing of the band's new form showed a sleeve in red, which isn't what Zero was wearing. Considering they're mixing the new album, it seems safe to assume the new iteration should show itself pretty soon.
