Ghost’s Tobias Forge revelead his secret! In a recent interview with Metal Hammer, Forge announced that he writes music in collaboration with outside writers with a rock background including Peter Svensson of The Cardigans and Klas Åhlund of Teddybears. He spoke about how making music with different musicians gave him a different kind of inspiration. Forge explained:
“Peter from The Cardigans is an old hard rocker, Klas Åhlund is an old metalhead. These are friends of mine, and we’re very fluent together. I know that when I’ve taken an idea as far as I can, then they can go, ‘Maybe we can do this, maybe we could go that way…’ All of a sudden, that opens my head. It becomes multi-dimensional. I think better when I have someone in the room that I trust. It makes me write better, because I get challenged.”
He also compared his writing process to a chef managing different restaurants, maintaining a unique ‘secret sauce’ in each project. He said:
“I like to compare what I’m doing to being a chef. A chef with a few different interests and specialities. So you might start a few different restaurants – an Italian one, a Greek one, an Asian Fusion one. But what they all have in common is the seasoning and the decor and the interior design… the secret sauce. With me, each record, each new cycle, is a new restaurant, but I don’t have to sit with an empty paper and come up with something new every time because the secret sauce is the same. If it comes from my notebook, it will sound like Ghost.”
Tobias Forge On Making New Records
Will Tobias Forge bring that ‘secret sauce’ to the new Ghost album? We don’t know exactly. What we do know is that Ghost is already preparing for a new album.
Back in December of 2022, when they had completed the album ‘IMPERA’ but had not yet released it, Forge talked about Metal Hammer about his approach to their albums. He said:
“As soon as I am done making a record, I’m pretty much fed up with it. I don’t want to hear it, I don’t want to know about it, I just want to forget about it. Once it hits the ears of people, depending on how it’s being received, that’s where you start from scratch again.”
In January, he updated Metal Hammer on the current working progress of the new album. He said:
“Everything I’m doing now is for the next record. I have a vague idea what that will be like and a vague idea of the title and the colour scheme.”
According to these statements, Forge has been focused on the new Ghost album for about a year now. In the meantime, Ghost released a 5-song EP called ‘Phantomime’ and a compilation of their past songs called ’13 Commandments.’
