GHOST Is About 'Escapism," Says One Of The Nameless Ghouls

Ghost Cult recently conducted an interview with one of the nameless ghouls from Swedish occult rockers GHOST. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Ghost Cult: [GHOST's debut album] "Opus Eponymous" made quite an impact when it was released back in 2010. How do you look back on that period?

Nameless Ghoul: I am really surprised that we managed to keep this up for three years. We actually wanted to have [the sophomore GHOST album] "Infestissumam" released in 2011 but we did not have the time. We then also had a label change. I thought that everyone was going to get tired of us.

Ghost Cult: Which is exactly the opposite of what happened…

Nameless Ghoul: Yeah, right now we feel this way, but not back then. As much as I do not feel confident that this may be something worth…. We won't be new in five years. You never know what happens. You have to keep re-inventing yourself all the time and be better. I think that what we probably added at first was a good alternative to the contemporary music that is out there. Even if we have some real issue on what we are singing about, especially in the new record, there is some sort of substance. GHOST is about escapism, which is opposite to what so many bands are doing by singing about life. "My mother and father are divorced," or "Fuck, life is shit" — all of that which goes through the entire scene today, where everything is supposed to be so real and so credible. What we are trying to do is so far from that, which may serve as a good antidote, even if we do not expect anyone to shy away from what they normally are to like us. It comes with the package: if you like a particular band, you are led into a complete world of what they are. What we represent as an alternative, which demands nothing. You can choose to partake if you want. A lot of people do that; they dress like [GHOST frontman] Papa or they dress like Ghouls, but we do not tell anybody to conform to our lifestyle, because nobody knows what our lifestyle is.

Ghost Cult: GHOST released a new song online entitled "Year Zero" some time ago. Why did you guys pick that particular song?

Nameless Ghoul: There are songs on "Infestissumam" that may be too similar to some on "Opus Eponymous" in some ways. So we wanted to present the album with a song that sort of stuck out a little bit. That's why we chose "Year Zero". We thought of doing a little bit of warmup with the new album with this song. "Year Zero" is like a steamroller now; it has become a big, massive song. It's almost like a ritual that sums up a lot of the contest of what we are doing.

Ghost Cult: And what's the deal with [GHOST's cover version of] "I Am A Marionette", a song originally recorded by ABBA?

Nameless Ghoul: I do not think it would have been very cool if we had recorded a MERCYFUL FATE song as a cover; it would have turned out so uninteresting, as much as we all love the band and as much as we should pay tribute to them. It would not have been challenging. We needed to find a song that lived up to some sort of prerequisites and that was also changeable in some ways with some angles that would be natural for GHOST to play. The next step we have considered were the lyrics, if they were good for Papa to sing, which is always the most important thing. A cover has to sort of work within the theme we are trying to build. "I Am A Marionette" proves our point.

Read the entire interview from Ghost Cult.

Performance (March 24 at the O2 Academy Brixton in London):