GHOST Performs 'Watcher In The Sky' Live For First Time At North American Tour Kick-Off

GHOST played the song "Watcher In The Sky" live for the first time last night (Friday, August 26) at the opening concert of the band's summer/fall 2022 North American tour with MASTODON at Pechanga Arena in San Diego, California.

"Watcher In The Sky" is taken from GHOST's fifth album, "Impera", which sold 70,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in its first week of release to land at position No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart. It marked the third top 10 album — and fifth top 40-charting set — for the Swedish act.

"Impera" landed at position No. 1 in Germany and Sweden, No. 2 in the U.K., Netherlands, Belgium and Norway, No. 3 in Australia, No. 5 in France and Ireland, and No. 20 in Italy.

"Impera" was released on March 11. The 12-song effort was produced by Klas Åhlund and mixed by Andy Wallace.

GHOST leader Tobias Forge told Metal Hammer magazine about "Watcher In The Sky": "It enthusiastically explains how we can utilize science to make the world smaller and to reverse scientific things. Basically a flattened Earth, which I found amusing."

GHOST's setlist for the August 26 concert at Pechanga Arena:

01. Kaisarion
02. Rats
03. Faith
04. Spillways
05. Devil Church
06. Cirice
07. Hunter's Moon
08. Ritual
09. Call Me Little Sunshine
10. Con Clavi Con Dio
11. Prime Mover
12. Watcher In The Sky
13. Year Zero
14. He Is
15. Miasma
16. Mary On A Cross
17. Mummy Dust

Encore

18. Dance Macabre
19. Square Hammer

Forge worked on the follow-up to 2018's "Prequelle" with Åhlund and Swedish co-writers Salem Al Fakir and Vincent Pontare, whose credits include Madonna and Lady Gaga.

In March 2020, at final show of GHOST's "Prequelle" tour in Mexico City, Mexico, the band officially introduced Papa Emeritus IV, the new character who is fronting the act for its "Impera" album phase.

Forge performed as a "new" Papa Emeritus on each of the band's first three LPs, with each version of Papa replacing the one that came before it. Papa Emeritus III was retired in favor of Cardinal Copia before the release of "Prequelle".

Forge recently confirmed to Consequence that he has already mapped out much of the follow-up to "Impera" LP. "I have an album in my head right now that I think is going to be different from the one I just made," he said. "Both 'Prequelle' and 'Impera' were ideas that I had since six, seven years back. They were so different from each other in the sense that the 'plague album,' as I call it, was about the little person's annihilation on almost more of like a carnal or a God's wrath point of view, whereas the 'imperial record' was more of a structural demise of the mechanics of society. So they felt like two different things and the idea that I have for the next record is also a different thing from that. It's just a way for me to compartmentalize the ideas of finding new ways to inspire me lyrically and conceptually."

He continued: "At the end of the day, it's just rock 'n' roll records, 40 minutes of rock music, so it's just a way to make it interesting for me to work with, and then as a result of that, luckily for a few times now, we've been able to put that together and compile it in a way that has a lot of our fans also finding it interesting to dive into. I think that it was just luck that we just happened to release it in a matter where it seems a little clairvoyant. But these are old subjects … everything's cyclical, that's the thing, everything just goes in circles so it's not very hard to be clairvoyant, you can just look back on time and sort of alter it a little, draw on, or shave off a mustache and you have a future asshole who will do something similar to something else a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago, three hundred years ago. It's always the same; it's very repetitive."