GHOST Wins Swedish GRAMMIS Award For 'Best Hard Rock/Metal'

Swedish occult rockers GHOST were honored in the "Best Hard Rock/Metal" category at the Swedish Grammis awards (Swedish Grammy equivalent),which was held last night (Wednesday, February 19) at Cirkus in Stockholm. The bands were all nominated for their most recent releases, all of which came out during 2013.

"Best Hard Rock/Metal" nominees were as follows:

* CRASHDÏET - The Savage Playground
* GHOST - Infestissumam
* NICKE BORG HOMELAND - Ruins Of A Riot
* THE KRISTET UTSEENDE - Pervogenesis
* WATAIN - The Wild Hunt

As previously reported, GHOST was also honored with the P3 Guld award (for "Infestissumam") from Swedish radio station P3 in the "Best Rock/Metal Album Of The Year" category. The winners were announced on January 18 during a live awards ceremony broadcast from the Scandinavium in Gothenburg, Sweden.

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.

The CD topped the official chart in the group's home country after selling nearly five times as many copies as the No. 2 album, MISS LI's "Wolves".

In an interview with ARTISTdirect, a nameless ghoul from GHOST said about "Infestissumam": "It feels way more theatrical and bombastic. In many ways, 'Infestissumam' is thematically a continuation of where [the debut album] 'Opus Eponymous' began. Whereas a lot of the thematic ideas we have in mind for upcoming albums might differ a little bit and will go in another direction. That's not to say we won't sing about the things we do and not have makeup. I'm just saying it will evolve into other things in the future. On this record, I feel like we're doing a lot of things we intended to do on the first naïvely being we could pull off a show like that at that point — which we couldn't. Now, we have a little bit more muscle. The attendance is probably more in accordance with being able to present a show like that."

Regarding the lyrical themes covered "Infestissumam", the nameless ghoul said: "Thematically we knew the major difference between the first and the second albums as much as we do between the second and the third. It's a bit ironic now. Jumping up to the contemporary controversy with our album artwork and the refusal of printers to print the art is funny because the whole record is about the presence of the devil. Obviously, it's about how mankind relate to the presence of the devil. Historically, it's always been the female body that has taken the fall for that, which is what happened in this case. The problem was a vagina in the art not the inverted crosses."

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

Last year's Grammis award in the "Best Hard Rock" category went to GRAVEYARD for the band's "Lights Out" album.