Ghost have shared the official music video for “Lachryma”, the second single from their upcoming sixth album, Skeletá.
Arriving in tandem with a lucid nightmare of a video featuring Papa V Perpetua‘s first full performance as newly anti-christened frontman, “Lachryma” is quite possibly the most emblematic example to date of Ghost‘s signature balance of dark lyrical foreboding and irresistible melodic uplift.
Following closely on the hooves of first Skeletá single “Satanized” — dubbed a “catchy goth-rock epic” by Vice and hailed by Brooklyn Vegan as “the band’s trademark occult rock sounding as equally eerie and triumphant as ever” — “Lachryma” supplants the demonic hooks of its predecessor with a purple haze of sonic flourishes that accomplish something even more insidious: a bonafide modern day rock anthem about weeping.
Skeletá will arrive on April 25 via Loma Vista Recordings, and can be pre-ordered here.
Tobias Forge recently spoke about “Lachryma” in an interview with Metal Hammer: “It opens with more of a riffage. And I guess it now comes off as somewhat of a ‘typical’ Ghost mash-up, where it’s heavy on one end and met with a big, bombastic chorus. That’s a song about self-deceit.”
Skeletá, is its most unflinchingly introspective work to date. Where previous Ghost albums dealt largely with chronicling and/or observing outward facing subject matter—such as Impera’s meditations on the rise and fall of empires and its predecessor Prequelle’s evocations of the ravages of era-defining plagues—Skeletá’s lyrics render the distinct individual emotional vistas of each of its 10 songs in one-on-one fashion, at times as if in a dialogue with oneself in a mirror. The result is a singular collection of timeless, universal sentiments, all filtered through a prism of a uniquely personal point of view.
