TOBIAS FORGE, MASTERMIND OF SWEDISH OCCULT ROCK SENSATION GHOST, TAKES GW DEEP INSIDE THE WRITING AND RECORDING PROCESS FOR THEIR MULTIPLE-CHART-TOPPING FIFTH ALBUM, IMPERA
BY AMIT SHARMA
TOBIAS FORGE LIKES haunting people. You can hear it in his music — from Ghost’s 2010 Opus Eponymous debut right through to this year’s fifth full-length, Impera, there are all sorts of tritones and chromatic flavors purposefully employed to send shivers down the listener’s spine. As the only official member of the band, working under a slightly different stage name for every album and supported by a revolving door of backing musicians known as the Nameless Ghouls, he’s managed to elevate the group’s name from relative obscurity in his native homeland of Sweden all the way through to top 10 charts and gargantuan arenas around the world. They now stand as the most successful rock band to emerge over the last decade or so — proving, without a shadow of a doubt, that the devil really does have all the best tunes.
“I find the tritone to be a very moody sound,” Forge tells Guitar World a few hours before he’s due to hit the stage and deliver one of the band’s live rituals in character as Papa Emeritus IV. “Of course, that all goes back to Black Sabbath, though it also comes from my background playing death metal [in early band Repugnant]. We used to do it all the time, in every song and every riff. Everything was atonal and tri-tonal. I was very inspired by Slayer, Morbid Angel, Possessed and Necrophagia. I carried those influences with me into Ghost as well, because that’s always been the way for me to express myself. The tritone makes me feel good… whether I’m hearing it or playing it!”
For album number five, Forge enlisted the talents of Opeth guitarist Fredrik Åkesson, who ended up performing all of the acoustic and electrics heard across its 12 mesmerizing tracks. He describes the Stockholm-based musician, who also played in Arch Enemy from 2005 to 2007 and occasionally collaborates with Europe guitarist John Norum, as an incredibly “diverse and multi-talented player” who can “do the blues and pretty much anything from this to that.” That narrative is certainly evident across the new music, which features some of the most devilishly finger-twisting guitar work on any Ghost release to date.
“Fredrik’s talent is so great he almost has talent spasms,” Forge says with a laugh. “If you want him to shred a million notes an hour, he can do that. But with me, you have to dub that shit — maybe up to three times — so you really know what you’re playing. I thi
