Despite enjoying mainstream success, Tobias Forge, the creative force behind Ghost, insists he’s not trying to write songs tailored for the charts. In fact, one of the band’s most well-known tracks was once brushed off by their label as little more than filler.
Throughout Ghost’s rise, parts of the heavy music community have criticized the band for sounding too accessible, suggesting Forge’s work strayed too far from metal’s rougher edges. Yet, he’s continued to blend the pop and metal influences that shaped him — and it’s clearly working.
Speaking on The Rock Hard Radio Show With Kim Rennie podcast (via Ultimate Guitar), Forge addressed the misconception that he’s focused on hit-making, particularly in light of the band’s newest release, Skeletá. When Rennie remarked that the album might be “more difficult to approach” than the more polished 2022 release Impera, Forge shared his perspective.
“Yeah, possibly. Just because you mentioned radio, and I’m obviously talking on the radio right now, and I must underline, underscore that I grew up with a radio on, so I have nothing against the format. I am also a songwriter, and I’m also very, very interested in the art of writing hit music. So there’s nothing bad about that. But for as long as we have, with Ghost, experienced some sort of what you might call mainstream success, where radio has been an element through which greater success could be achieved, it has been a little bit of a question mark, exactly what are the elements needed in order to succeed?”
The conversation turned personal when Forge recalled how a particular track, initially dismissed by the label, ended up becoming a breakout hit.
“And I think that the biggest element of surprise was some years ago when I had written a song that, according to the lore, of course, was written 50 years ago, but was a song that I had written and recorded, and I showed it to the label and I was, like, ‘How about that?’ And they were, like, ‘What?’ ‘It’s pretty good. My kid likes it.’ And they were, like, ‘Okay, it’s a good song, but it’s like a B-side. It’s not meant for…’ It was just like a question mark. ‘What do you mean? It’s like an old song, right?'”
“I was, like, ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s a good song. Okay, regardless, I’m gonna play it live,” Forge continued. “So we started playing that immediately, the moment it came out. And I felt like, ‘Wow, that’s amazing. One of the best songs I’ve ever written is like just a B-side. Fine.’ A few years later, it turned out that it was gonna be, so far, the biggest song of my career. That turned a lot of heads within the label world because they were, like, ‘Oh, we didn’t know.'”
It’s probably safe to assume that the song Forge is talking about is “Mary On A Cross”, which appeared as the B-side to Ghost’s 2019 EP Seven Inches of Satanic Panic, opposite “Kiss The Go-Goat.” The song found new life in 2022 when it went viral on TikTok, ultimately landing on the Billboard Hot 100 — the band’s first entry on that chart.
Reflecting on that unexpected success, Forge shared a larger takeaway: “What it told me was just like, we have no plan — I have no plan — so I’m not gonna chase that. I am gonna write songs — I’m gonna write the best songs I can ever write — and we’ll see what happens with them because there’s no clear way of telling exactly how it’s gonna materialize to a song that is worth anything from a hit point of view. And I felt that is not even a bad thing because I’m in a great spot anyway.”
He added that letting go of the pressure to write another hit has been freeing: “I can make a record filled with songs that are maybe too hard or maybe too this or too little of that or just thematically sits together. If it’s a hit, it will show itself, it will materialize. If it’s not a hit, that’s fine. We can play the other hits too. We’re blessed, for lack of a better, more fitting word, to be able to go out on tour. And we have a lot of fans, and we have a lot of support anyway, and that, to me, actually alleviated me from a little bit of that stress because I’m, like, ‘I’m not gonna chase another big hit.'”
