GHOST's 'Infestissumam' Wins P3 GULD Award For 'Best Rock/Metal Album Of The Year'

Swedish occult rockers GHOST were honored with the P3 Guld award (for their criticially acclaimed "Infestissumam" release) from Swedish radio station P3 in the "Best Rock/Metal Album Of The Year" category. The winners were announced earlier tonight (Saturday, January 18) during a live awards ceremony broadcast from the Scandinavium in Gothenburg, Sweden.

"Best Rock/Metal Album Of The Year" nominees were as follows:

* CULT OF LUNA - "Vertikal"
* GHOST - "Infestissumam"
* WATAIN - "The Wild Hunt"
* IN SOLITUDE - "Sister"
* TIGER BELL - "Don't Wanna Hear About Your Band"

Last year's P3 Guld award in the "Best Rock/Metal Album Of The Year" category went to MESHUGGAH. Also nominated for the "Rock/Metal" award were CRUCIFIED BARBARA, GRAVEYARD, SPIDERS and SWITCH OPENS.

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."