Rock isn’t dead — it just dresses that way.
On May 7 at the Uber Arena in Berlin, I saw Ghost, the Swedish hard rock act, in all its guitar-riff glory, complete with creepy costumes, spooky stained-glass projections and pyro effects. Much of this is pretty standard for arena rock. In other ways, though, the Ghost show looked very 2025 — fans in makeup, dressed as characters, and discussing the “ritual,” which is what Ghost calls a concert. Singer and auteur Tobias Forge performs as a character from the band’s “lore,” a complicated fictional backstory that involves a sinister church and its leaders. It’s a cinematic universe of sorts — beloved by fans and slightly confusing for the uninitiated. Forget concept albums — Ghost plays concept rock.
To fans, Forge isn’t performing as the singer and sole creative force of Ghost — he’s in costume playing Papa V Perpetua, the latest in a series of popelike leaders of a fictional church. The other musicians, also in costume, are “nameless ghouls,” whose real identities are never announced, although fans inevitably seem to discover who they are. (This seems like a convenient fiction, but the same might be said of a “band” in which the musicians work for the lead singer.) Before Forge played Papa V Perpetual, he performed in character as Papa Emeritus, Papa Nihil and Cardinal Copia. And his real name wasn’t even known until it was revealed in a 2017 lawsuit over royalties.
This might sound impressively nerdy — and it is, in a really fun way. But it did not prevent Ghost from scoring a No. 1 album this week with Skeletá. (The accent, like the metal umlaut, seems to be silent.) Indeed, it seems to help Ghost appeal to devoted fans. Skeletá, the first hard rock No. 1 album in four years, sold and streamed 86,000 equivalent units in the U.S., of which 89% came from sales, and 44,000 from vinyl alone, according to Luminate. (The band released 15 variants on vinyl, three on CD and four on cassette.) Worldwide, according to the band’s management, it sold more than 89,000 vinyl copies of Skeletá in its first week.
It’s unusual for a rock band to sell so many albums these days — especially a rock band that’s determinedly a rock band, rather than a pop act with rock band characteristics. Some of my colleagues were surprised, as was I. Maybe we shouldn’t have been, though. Rock still has mass appeal — it’s just more obvious from concert ticket sales than streaming numbers. And although Ghost isn’t reinventing the genre musically — the band plays catchy and compelling hard rock, without much in the way of new sounds — it presents what it does in a very innovative way.
The Ghost experience is made for modern Internet-savvy fans, from the YouTube videos that tell the elaborate backstory, to the comic book series that fleshes it out, to the “GTV” faux-news “Ghoulbangers Ball” segments that let the band cover its own “rituals.” It has its own fan army of sorts, since about a fifth of the attendees at the Berlin show seemed to dress up for the occasion. At the risk of offending fans on all sides, Ghost offers an entire world for fans to dive into, in a slightly similar way that K-pop does, only with the trappings of prog-rock concept albums, rather than pop-idol-worship.
This might sound absurd. But many artists who are loved, rather than merely liked, offer some kind of world to explore, some manner of lore to learn. It’s hardly ever described as such, of course, but the effect isn’t so different. At this point, understanding in any detail the twists and turns of Drake’s feud with Kendrick Lamar means spending some serious time online. For that matter, so does knowing which songs the Grateful Dead tend to play in the first or second set, which is something that I learned decades ago because I felt it really mattered, for reasons that I am now unable to remember, and if I did would be embarrassed to share. This is part of the fun of loving an artist. Ghost just delivers that experience in an especially wild way. There’s plenty of hard rock style — references to Satan and so forth — as well as a distinctly prog-rock love of Latin. The first Ghost album was Opus Eponymous, which is the second-coolest Latin album name after Amon Düül’s Phallus Dei.
I could only really experience this from the outside; I didn’t have enough time to dive in very deeply, and if you asked me what Skeletá was about, I’d have to say that it’s about 45 minutes. The band’s management estimates that about half of the people who see Ghost in concert know some of the lore, which is pretty impressive. Ghost may operate like a cult band. But any act that’s touring arenas with a No. 1 album has gone far beyond the usual definition of the term.
The only big act that seems remotely comparable to Ghost is Sleep Token, another prog-influenced hard rock act that plays with masks and anonymity. (The group’s members are Vessel, and musicians who go by II, III and IV.) It also markets its music and mystique online, and its new album, Even in Arcadia, is expected to debut near, if not at, the top of the charts next week. Sleep Token is musically different from Ghost, of course, and the band has its own concept — and its own cult. But it shows that there’s life in rock yet — even if it looks undead.
