Last year's fantastic Impera is still getting regular spins here at Metal Hammer HQ, but it turns out that Ghost leader and band mastermind Tobias Forge is now officially into the writing process for that album's successor. In an exclusive interview in the latest issue of Metal Hammer magazine, Forge says he has "a few songs" on the go for Ghost's sixth studio full-length, dropping a casual culinary metaphor to explain his writing process.
“I like to compare what I’m doing to being a chef,” he says. “A chef with a few different interests and specialities. So you might start a few different restaurants – an Italian one, a Greek one, an Asian Fusion one. But what they all have in common is the seasoning and the decor and the interior design... the secret sauce. With me, each record, each new cycle, is a new restaurant, but I don’t have to sit with an empty paper and come up with something new every time because the secret sauce is the same. If it comes from my notebook, it will sound like Ghost.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Forge also talks openly about his willingness to work with outside collaborators, having crafted Ghost songs with input from writers including Klas Åhlund (Britney Spears, Charlie XCX), Salem Al Fakir and Vincent Pontare (Madonna, Avicii), and ex-Cardigans man Peter Svensson.
“What they all have in common is that they all come from a rock background,” Forge explains. “Peter from The Cardigans is an old hard rocker, Klas Åhlund is an old metalhead. These are friends of mine, and we’re very fluent together. I know that when I’ve taken an idea as far as I can, then they can go, ‘Maybe we can do this, maybe we could go that way...’ All of a sudden, that opens my head. It becomes multi-dimensional. I think better when I have someone in the room that I trust. It makes me write better, because I get challenged.”
You can read more from Tobias in the latest issue of Metal Hammer. Pick up your copy here while stocks last.
