Ghost are celebrating the 10th anniversary of Meliora by letting you exchange real money for fake money

Ghost are reissuing their third album Meliora to celebrate its 10th anniversary, and the package includes a fake dollar bill.

The Swedish hard rock/heavy metal band are marking 10 years of the album – released exactly a decade ago today (August 21) – by reissuing it in vinyl bundles, each of which comes with a ‘$666’ note that has ‘former’ frontman Papa Emeritus III’s face on it.

Pre-orders are now live, ahead of an October 17 release.

Ghost were formed in 2006 by singer/multi-instrumentalist Tobias Forge, who’s played every iteration of the band’s ‘Papa’ frontman, who changes with each new album cycle. Preceded by the single Cirice (which won the Grammy Award For Best Metal Performance in 2016), Meliora marked the band’s biggest commercial success at that point, reaching number eight in the US. It also brought them back to number one in Sweden, replicating a feat first achieved by 2013 album Infestissumam.

Talking to Metal Hammer in 2015, Forge – under the pseudonym of ‘a Nameless Ghoul’ – said that Meliora is conceptually about the absence of God.

“The first album [2010’s Opus Eponymous] was about the impending doom of a more old-school Biblical sort, where death and destruction will come in the form of locusts and dark fog: it was the coming of the Antichrist,” he explained.

“The second album [Infestissumam] was about the presence of the Devil, taking place aesthetically in a 1700s milieu with a more Baroque theme. Whereas this album is the absence of God. It’s a futuristic, pre-apocalyptic record. The cat is out of the house and the mice dance on the table. But at some point, the cat comes home…”

Ghost released their sixth album, Skeletá, to positive reviews earlier this year and recently wrapped the US leg of their global Skeletour. The band will play three concerts at Palacio De Los Deportes in Mexico City from September September 23 to 25.

Ghost’s Skeletour dates are phone-free events, with attendees needing to put their mobiles into magnetically sealed pouches that can only be unsealed by security as they leave the auditorium.

Last month, Forge said that the phone ban has been a “life-changer” for Ghost.

“Just walking off stage first night [of the tour] was just, like, this has completely changed the entire outlook of how this feels,” he said at a live Q&A in Birmingham, UK. “So, yeah, now we’re doing that. And I think that there are a lot of bands that are looking at this and just, like, ‘OK, so how do we do that too?’”

Bands that have followed in Ghost’s footsteps of discouraging phones at concerts include Iron Maiden. While not outright banning mobile devices, the UK metal legends issued a statement before the European leg of their Run For Your Lives tour this summer, urging fans to keep phones in their pockets.