It looks as if we won’t be getting a new Ghost album in 2020 after all.
In a new interview with Sweden Rock Magazine, frontman Tobias Forge discussed the band’s upcoming fifth studio album, of which he is currently entrenched in the pre-production and songwriting process, giving a very different timeline for its recording than originally believed.
Said Forge (as reported by Blabbermouth and translated by Sweden Rock Magazine),
“The plan now is for me to be here [in the studio] writing for another two months until Christmas. The idea is for the album to be recorded in January. The actual recording will last around six weeks and then there’s two to three weeks of mixing and mastering. So sometime in March the record should be finished, but it won’t be released until after the summer. As it looks now, knock on wood, we will then go on tour. We won’t release an album until we know that we are actually going on tour. The album release will coincide with the start of a tour. Of course, we could announce an album release date and then, for some reason, it might not be possible to tour, but that’s a whole other matter.”
Forge’s description contradicts an interview from earlier this month with Swedish magazine VK that indicated that new music would be out this year. In that article (as translated by Google Translate), the reporter noted:
“The idea was that Ghost would hit the road again in March next year. Those plans have been postponed until the autumn of 2021, but a new album will be released this winter.”
One thing we do know about the upcoming album is that it will have a new character heading up the band. During the final stop on their A Pale Tour Named Death tour in Mexico City, Mexico, Forge unveiled that Cardinal Copia had become Papa Emeritus IV.
Ghost released their latest album, Prequelle, in 2018.
Sweden Rock Magazine’s full interview with Forge will be featured in the magazine’s November 2020 issue, which comes out on November 24.
