GHOST's Popularity Would Be Unaffected By Bandmember Identity Disclosure

Metallart conducted an interview with one of the Nameless Ghouls from Swedish occult rockers GHOST before the band's July 3 performance at the Main Square festival in Arras, France as the support act for IRON MAIDEN. You can now watch the chat below. A couple of excepts follow.

On whether GHOST would be just as successful if the bandmembers' identities were revealed:

"Yeah, I think so. Even though people might know who we are, we're still gonna perform in [costumes]. It matters, but I'd rather keep it this way for a while. It's nice being unknown."

On the importance of using masks in GHOST:

"We started using masks in order for the band to be anonymous and full of mystique, because it's not me, the person behind the mask, that's important at all; it's the music and the band. It's not important that people know who I am or how I look or how I feel or what I had for breakfast. It's more important that [the focus remain] on the band when it comes to [presenting the] concepts. So the masks are very important to us that way."

BEHEMOTH's Adam "Nergal" Darski recently posted a photo on Instagram of him hanging out backstage at the FortaRock festival in The Netherlands with Swedish musician Tobias Forge — believed to be none other than GHOST frontman Papa Emeritus II. The photo was accompanied by the caption "If you have ghosts... U have everything;)", a line from the ROKY ERICKSON song "If You Have Ghosts", which was covered by GHOST on their EP "If You Have Ghost", released in November 2013.

Speaking to Jägermeister at this past summer's Sonisphere festival in the U.K., one of the Nameless Ghouls from GHOST stated about the photo leak: "I mean, it's… We don't really know what to say about that except for we keep our identities as secret as we possibly can, of course, but at some point it's bound to happen, some things that are not really optimal for us, of course. But the identity part is always gonna be, for as long as can take it, it's gonna be a hassle in many ways, and I think we have managed to keep it below the radar, for the most part, at least."

GHOST's sophomore album, "Infestissumam", sold around 14,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to debut at position No. 28 on The Billboard 200 chart.

GHOST was forced to modify its name in the U.S. to GHOST B.C. for "legal reasons."