From 2010 to 2016, Ghost’s career was pretty much the ideal for a metal band. With debut album Opus Eponymous, they found underground goodwill; with Infestissumam, they courted mainstream controversy; then, with Meliora, they won the masses over, playing late-night TV shows and earning a Grammy Award. The single Square Hammer pushed things even further when it topped the US Mainstream Rock chart. No one could dispute it: Sweden’s masked devil church had become metal’s next big thing.
The road from there should have been simple, but instead Ghost hit one of the biggest bumps in their history. Every member except their Pope-aping frontman stepped down in 2016, and the following April, four of them sued their former cohort over allegedly unpaid royalties. The band continued with a new lineup, touring with Iron Maiden and headlining UK festival Bloodstock, but 2017 has since been described as their annus horribilis. Singer/founder Tobias Forge was no longer anonymous, and the inner workings of one of heavy music’s most mysterious forces were laid bare.
“I had to go through a little bit of surgery when it came to my social life,” Forge admitted to The Guardian in June 2018, when the suit was still ongoing. “A lot of the decisions that I made were based on trying to accommodate people’s wishes, trying to be a friend and set them up for life. That intention seems to have been turned into me trying to fuck people over. That feels like a betrayal because this was not done out of spite at all.”
The legal battle continued until October 2018, when a Swedish court dismissed the plaintiffs’ claims. But, Ghost didn’t wait until the bang of a gavel to re-establish themselves. Almost exactly a year after news of the suit broke and Forge was outed as the man beneath the mitre, they returned with Rats. It was a bold, bombastic comeback, and with its introduction of a new frontman character – Cardinal Copia, still portrayed by Forge – it shrugged off any notion that the band had lost their mystique.
“What I hadn’t foreseen was the fans and their willingness to embrace [Ghost’s image and anonymity] and play along,” Forge told Revolver during one of his first unmasked interviews. “I guess that’s the whole thing with showbiz and magic tricks: It’s like you have a silent agreement with your audience.”
The song was the first single from Ghost’s fourth full-length album, Prequelle, and it was an intentional attempt to double down on the crowd-pleasing success of Square Hammer. Even though the main riff bore hints of the band’s early Candlemass worship, the seemingly cocaine-laced chorus – ‘Rats! Oh-ah-ahh!’ – was more glam rock than doom metal. Forge’s main goal when writing the track was to come up with an earworm album opener, the same way that Square Hammer had kickstarted 2016’s Popestar EP.
He told The Pulse Of Radio: “A few years ago, I decided, like, ‘I really want to have a big opening track that just blows people’s minds immediately.’ So I wrote Square Hammer and that went well. But I didn’t want Square Hammer to turn into [the Rolling Stones’] Start Me Up, where that always feels best to play first. I want to be able to mix it up. So we needed another song that works as an opening track. That was basically my intention with Rats.”
To achieve his goal, Forge turned to one of heavy metal’s most popular names, Ozzy Osbourne. He revealed in conversation with Loudwire that the Prince Of Darkness’ 1980 solo song I Don’t Know was a major influence.
“When I was a kid, there was a concert called the Moscow Peace Festival,” he recalled. “It was broadcast on TV. It’s one of those moments that I remember so clearly, I was eight years old. Ozzy Osbourne opened with I Don’t Know, and it’s such a fucking great opening track. This was in front of like 80,000 people, who went nuts. I wanted to have that feel with Rats. […] If you ever want to play bigger places, you need to have records that sound like you’re playing in big places.”
Where the music saw Ghost stick with what had just worked, the lyrics marked something of a left turn. Their first three albums were about such heretical things as the conception and birth of the Antichrist and the absence of God. Album four, on the other hand, was about the bubonic plague, with Forge likening the blind faith of Middle-Age peasants to the way people were behaving on social media in the late 2010s.
“Why are we being stricken down by this great scourge? It must be because of our not fearing God enough and all this superstitious bullshit,” he told Revolver. “There’s a lot that you would recognise today in online mannerisms. In many ways, we’ve gone back a few steps because now it’s closer to how it was back in the old days when people were standing at the square and all of a sudden, it’s like in Monty Python’s Life Of Brian: ‘Stone him! Ra! Ra! Ra!’ Public trials are very unsupervised and extremely swift and speak to the most primordial parts of us.”
Rats – as Prequelle’s first track proper, not counting atmospheric intro Ashes – wasn’t literally about rodents, but about how misinformation can spread like vermin from a plague ship. ‘In times of turmoil, in times like these, belief’s contagious, spreading disease,’ Forge sang during the first verse. ‘This wretched mischief is now coursing through your souls, never to let go, never to let go.’
The single dropped on April 13, 2018, accompanied by a marvellous video that depicted Cardinal Copia dancing in a decimated cafe. Almost instantly, Forge’s dreams of the track thrusting his band to big venues came true. It repeated Square Hammer’s feat of topping the US Mainstream Rock chart. Then, barely two weeks later, Ghost announced their first arena shows, set to take place in Los Angeles and New York in November and December. Prequelle dropped in June and became the band’s highest-charting album, reaching No.3 in the US and No.8 in the UK. Legal turmoil be damned – this rocket ride up the heavy metal ranks could not be stopped.
In 2025, it’s unclear when the good ship Ghost will run out of steam, but it won’t be any time soon. Rats is now a must-play for the band on their world-conquering arena tours, having made 350 setlists and counting, and it’s easy to understand why. Although it was a top-notch song, it was moreover a symbolic victory, proving that they could thrive even after the mystery around them got pulled away.
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