TOBIAS FORGE LIKES haunting people. You can hear it in his music — from Ghost’s 2010 Opus Eponymous debut right through to this year’s fifth full-length, Impera, there are all sorts of tritones and chromatic flavors purposefully employed to send shivers down the listener’s spine. As the only official member of the band, working under a slightly different stage name for every album and supported by a revolving door of backing musicians known as the Nameless Ghouls, he’s managed to elevate the group’s name from relative obscurity in his native homeland of Sweden all the way through to top 10 charts and gargantuan arenas around the world. They now stand as the most successful rock band to emerge over the last decade or so — proving, without a shadow of a doubt, that the devil really does have all the best tunes.
“I find the tritone to be a very moody sound,” Forge tells a few hours before he’s due to hit the stage and deliver one of the band’s live rituals in character as Papa Emeritus IV. “Of course, that all goes back to Black Sabbath,]. We used to do it all the time, in every song and every riff. was atonal and tritonal. I was very inspired by Slayer, Morbid Angel, Possessed and Necrophagia. I carried those influences with me into Ghost as well, because that’s always been the way for me to express myself. The tritone makes me feel … whether I’m hearing it or playing it!”
