Ghost recently released a new 7" titled Seven Inches Of Satanic Panic. According to vocalist and mastermind Tobias Forge in an interview with Ultimate Guitar, the two songs on the release "were recorded 50 years ago so they have nothing to do with the new record." So that explains how psychedelic they sound and how the very old Papa Nihil was fronting the band then, right?
In all seriousness, Forge then talks a little more about the new Ghost album coming either late 2020 or early 2021. He says he doesn't have much written for it yet, but will spend the majority of 2020 in the studio working on it.
"I'm still yet to start the real process. The real process being: in January, I go into the studio, Monday through Friday, every week, just finishing tracks. That's how it works.
"So up until then, I don't know, there might be a song in my head but it's not finished until it's recorded. I've only recorded, so far, a demo of one track, just to get my rocks off and feel that I've started doing something.
"So one track is sort of listenable and then I have maybe 50 ideas for tracks but generally, in order to make a song, you need about three ideas to be put together into a song. So I feel that four months from now, the pile of ideas – riffs, vignettes, lyric ideas, and all these different things.
"'From the Pinnacle to the Pit' [from Ghost's third album, 2015's 'Meliora'] was written on bass. That's why it sounds like that. Some are written as a drum idea, like 'Death Knell' [from Ghost's 2010 debut 'Opus Eponymous'] was written as a drum idea. So there are so many different angles that the songs can start from.
"But now, knowing that I have one song I can listen to and the pile of ideas, I feel very confident that [I can get a new album done] from January to September [2020] – that's the production window – January is starting and September is mastering, basically. I feel as prepared now as I have going in to make any of the previous albums."
Ghost also recently re-released their 2018 album Prequelle as a pretty cool box set, if you haven't checked that out yet.
