GHOST's TOBIAS FORGE: 'I've Always Been Very, Very Keen On Not Repeating Myself'

Andy Hall of the Des Moines, Iowa radio station Lazer 103.3 recently conducted an interview with GHOST leader Tobias Forge. You can now listen to the chat using the SoundCloud widget below.

Speaking about GHOST's musical evolution, Forge said: "As a writer, I've always been very, very keen on not repeating myself. Obviously, there's a certain degree of DNA or familiarity, if you want, that might be useful to throw in there. And sometimes you need to let yourself intuitively write something typical, but you need to have that dialog in your mind as well — if you're intuitively writing something that lends your DNA on to something in a good way or if you're repeating yourself. Which is one of the hardest things. That's why it becomes more difficult every time you're making a record — especially if you're writing or recording a record on to a momentum, and specifically writing it on to a momentum that has been, in this case, been writing on three previous records that were not necessarily like each other… they weren't very similar at all. And then you're making a fourth, and at some point, you will have to decide, 'Am I gonna go back and do an 'Opus [Eponymous] II', or am I gonna do an 'Infestissumam II' or a 'Meliora II', or am I just gonna try to do something completely different with the risk of completely screwing things up. And so far — knock [on] wood — I think I've been able to do that quite well. But it gets harder every time."

He continued: "With age — I don't wanna bore everyone with the idea of me aging — but, as a kid, you can see a big hole in the ground, and if you're 10 or 12 or 14, you're, like, 'Of course I can jump from one edge to the other,' and you do it. While when you're 20, you're, like, 'Meh… Maybe I can. I think I can, but I'm gonna do it later.' And when you're 30, you're, like, 'I'm not even gonna try. I think I can do it, but I don't…' So, sooner or later, you're gonna become a little bit more anxious about not losing what you have and you're not gonna be able to really fully throw yourself head first into the wall, so you have to force yourself to do that sometimes."

Next month, GHOST will head to North America for its 40-date headline tour that starts October 25. That run will include two arena performances, November 16 at the Los Angeles Forum and December 15 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

It's already been quite a year for the Swedish rock band. In addition to the early global success of "Prequelle", "Rats", the album's first single, has accumulated more than 25 million streams, set a 2018 record for maintaining the #1 spot at U.S. Rock Radio for nine consecutive weeks, and the track's companion video has logged north of 12 million YouTube views. Last month, GHOST released the provocative Carpenter Brut remix of one of "Prequelle"'s most popular tracks, "Dance Macabre", that crossed the band into the world of dance music.