GRAMMY-winning Swedish theatrical rock icons Ghost have only begun the next phase of its inevitable path to world domination, announcing their new album, Skeletá, set to be released on April 25 via Loma Vista Recordings. Accompanying the album announcement, the band has unveiled the official music video for an insidiously melodic lead single “Satanized,” which you can check out below.
Described as “an avalanche of infectious hooks and harmonies” that is “buoyed by a hypnotic shuffle,” “Satanized” takes listeners on a descent into darkness. As the song’s opening lines declare, “There is something inside me and they don’t know if there is a cure,” the track establishes its eerie atmosphere. The press release suggests that by the time these words reach the listener, “it will already be too late: You will have been Satanized.”
The music video for “Satanized” also marks a new era for Ghost, introducing Papa V Perpetua as the band’s new front-facing persona for their 2025 tour cycle. This character continues the band’s tradition of evolving stage identities, adding another chapter to their theatrical.
Order Skeletá here.
With hundreds of thousands of tickets already sold for the first leg of a worldwide arena tour featuring the band’s first-ever headline date at Madison Square Garden, Ghost is poised to bring the most introspective and inward-focused material of the band’s career to vivid life—and in suitably grandiose style: The tour supporting Skeletá will feature the debut of the newly anti-christened Papa V Perpetua, as he presides over a phantasmagoric new production that promises to elevate the live rituals that propelled the band’s debut feature film Rite Here Rite Now to become the highest grossing hard rock cinema event in North American history.
In an effort to further engage their fanbase, Ghost has also launched an interactive digital experience called The Satanizer. This unique project, developed in collaboration with Jason Zada (best known for Elf Yourself), allows fans to insert themselves into the “Satanized” music video. By uploading a photo, participants will receive a personalized video clip, which can be shared on social media, showing that they too have been “Satanized.”
Produced by Gene Walker and mixed by Andy Wallace and Dan Malsch, Skeletá, is the band’s 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. However, Skeletá is so much more than the sum of its tracklist. Its songs form a thematic arc that begins with the ascendant and anthemic “Peacefield,” then delves into progressively darker spiritual territory by way of the bittersweet melodies of “Lachryma,” demonically hooky first single “Satanized” and soul-searching epic ballad “Guiding Lights.”
