Rating: 9.5 / 10 Stars
GHOST is: Tobias Forge (Vocals, Guitars, Bass, Keyboards, Percussion, and Creative Direction) and the Nameless Ghouls (Guitars, Bass, Keyboards, Drums, Percussion, and Backing Vocals)
REVIEW – One week before GHOST unveil IMPERA on March 11, 2022, the air around the Swedish theatrical rock institution feels unusually charged, as if the band are not merely preparing to release another album, but to raise a monument and then set fire to it from within. That has always been the paradox of Ghost. They build with grandeur, but they think in decay. They dress corruption in velvet, crown it in gold, light the candles, cue the choir, and then ask why everyone looks so surprised when the cathedral starts collapsing.
With IMPERA, Tobias Forge appears ready to take the full machinery of GHOST and point it toward one of humanity’s oldest obsessions: empire. Not just empire as history-book conquest, but empire as system, impulse, illusion, appetite, and disease. The album, set for release through Loma Vista Recordings, arrives as GHOST’s fifth studio full-length and follows 2018’s ‘Prequelle,’ a record that turned plague, death, and medieval dread into something strangely glamorous and unnervingly timely. Where ‘Prequelle‘ felt like a dance macabre at the edge of biological catastrophe, IMPERA seems built around a more organized form of annihilation: power with architecture, corruption with ceremony, collapse with a flag waving above it.
Forge has described the conceptual seed of IMPERA as coming from his fascination with the rise and fall of empires, and that framework feels perfectly suited to GHOST’s entire aesthetic language. This is a band that has always understood hierarchy, pageantry, spectacle, clergy, devotion, manipulation, and mass participation. GHOST’s world is already imperial by design. There are titles, costumes, rituals, transitions, successors, symbols, and masks. The genius of IMPERA, at least from the material already circling the altar, is that it seems to make the band’s own grandiosity part of the argument. GHOST are not just singing about empires. They are using the sound of empire to critique empire.
The opening instrumental “Imperium” sets the stage like a procession entering a marble hall. It feels ceremonial, almost heroic, but with GHOST, heroism is never simple. The brightness is suspicious. The grandeur glows too cleanly. It is the sound of a regime before the cracks become visible, a gleaming overture that suggests triumph while quietly preparing the listener for ruin. GHOST have always been masters of the beautiful trap, and “Imperium” appears designed as the first step into one.
Then “Kaisarion” comes charging through the gates. As the first full song, it feels like GHOST kicking open the album with frantic light, velocity, and theatrical force. It is bright, immediate, and almost ecstatic, but beneath that rush is something uglier. Forge has framed the song around the destruction of what people do not understand, that hideous human instinct to attack complexity with a smile and call it righteousness. That makes “Kaisarion” more than an opener. It is a warning shot. It captures the frightening joy of the mob, the way ignorance can become communal, musical, and self-congratulatory. GHOST make it sound exhilarating because history often does, right up until the bodies are counted.
“Spillways” looks poised to be one of the record’s most infectious moments, a track where GHOST’s classic-rock instincts and melodic discipline rise to the surface with almost dangerous ease. The title itself is perfect. A spillway exists because pressure must go somewhere. It does not eliminate the flood; it redirects it before everything breaks. That image speaks directly to the psychological undercurrent running through the album. Empires are built on pressure. So are people. So are institutions. So are belief systems. “Spillways” seems to place that pressure inside the individual body, where private unrest becomes just as volatile as public collapse.
Then comes “Call Me Little Sunshine,” already released ahead of the album and serving as one of IMPERA’s clearest statements of seduction. GHOST have always understood evil best when they make it intimate. This is not the devil as a snarling beast at the door. This is the voice already inside the room. The hand that offers guidance. The torch that may be leading you deeper into the woods. The song’s slow, serpentine pull echoes the emotional architecture of GHOST classics like “Cirice,” where comfort and corruption become almost indistinguishable. Forge’s gift lies in making the listener understand why people follow the wrong voice. It is not always fear. Sometimes it is warmth.
“Hunter’s Moon,” originally written for the Halloween Kills soundtrack, enters the album with a different kind of menace. In the context of IMPERA, it feels less like a soundtrack detour and more like a study in obsession as ownership. The song’s stalking energy places the listener inside a warped emotional logic, one where pursuit masquerades as devotion and violence convinces itself it is love. That fits GHOST’s world beautifully. Empire, after all, often speaks the language of protection while practicing possession. “Hunter’s Moon” carries that same sickly intimacy: I am coming for you because you belong to me.
“Watcher in the Sky” may be the album’s most incisive act of satire. Its theme, as Forge has explained, touches on regression and the absurd desire to bend science backward in service of dogma. That premise feels painfully modern. It is not anti-science in the simple sense. It is worse. It is science conscripted into the empire’s service, inquiry forced to kneel before ideology, tools of discovery repurposed to validate what power already wants to believe. Musically, one expects this track to loom rather than sprint, to repeat and build like a command becoming doctrine. GHOST have always known that repetition is not only musical. It is political. It is religious. It is how belief becomes obedience.
The instrumental “Dominion” appears to function as a ceremonial passageway, the sort of brief connective tissue GHOST use so well when they want an album to feel staged rather than merely sequenced. In GHOST’s hands, these moments matter. They are not filler. They are architecture. They tell the listener where to stand, when to kneel, and when the next curtain is about to rise.
Then there is “Twenties,” perhaps the strangest and most grotesque pre-release glimpse into IMPERA’s larger vision. It is not designed to be graceful. It is designed to leer. Forge has described it as a machine disguised as a leader, a voice selling hope while demanding labor, loyalty, and surrender. That makes the song feel like propaganda music from a carnival dictatorship, all swagger, greed, and forced celebration. It is GHOST at their most deliberately ugly, and that ugliness is the point. “Twenties” does not seduce like “Call Me Little Sunshine.” It bullies. It grins. It promises a glorious future with one hand while reaching for your throat with the other.
“Darkness at the Heart of My Love” suggests one of the album’s most dramatic emotional turns. Even the title feels like a gothic thesis, but GHOST have always had a way of making melodrama feel architectural rather than ornamental. Love in GHOST’s universe is rarely pure. It is devotional, manipulative, sacrificial, poisoned, sanctified, and sold back to the believer as salvation. If IMPERA is truly an album about systems of power, then a song like this may be where the empire becomes personal. The machinery of domination does not only exist in governments and churches. It exists in the heart, in the home, in the language of affection when affection becomes control.
“Griftwood” seems ready to bring a glossy hard-rock shine into the record’s final stretch. Forge has spoken about loving Hollywood rock, Van Halen, Mötley Crüe, and that Sunset Strip sense of lift and polish, and this track appears to channel that brightness while twisting it into commentary. The title tells you everything. This is not merely celebration. It is exposure. Grift dressed as virtue. Hypocrisy with a spotlight. Faith as branding. GHOST are especially effective when they make corruption sound like a hit single, and “Griftwood” appears to be exactly that kind of weapon: a gleaming anthem with rot beneath the lacquer.
“Bite of Passage” looks to serve as a brief threshold before the final act, a shadowed doorway into the album’s closing statement. GHOST understand pacing better than many bands operating at this scale. They know when an album needs a breath, a corridor, a moment where the listener feels the room change.
That room opens into “Respite on the Spitalfields,” the closing track and, by title alone, one of the album’s most evocative pieces. If “Kaisarion” is the frantic spark of destruction, “Respite on the Spitalfields” feels positioned as the aftermath: the empire surveyed at dusk, the banners lowered, the bodies remembered, the ghosts still speaking through the stone. GHOST closers often carry emotional weight because Forge understands that spectacle must eventually resolve into consequence. The question hanging over IMPERA is not whether empires fall. They do. The question is what remains after the faithful stop singing.
What makes IMPERA so intriguing before its arrival is that it seems to understand scale as both sound and subject. GHOST are no longer simply dressing occult rock in theatrical robes. They are using arena rock, glam metal, classic heavy metal, pop structure, and liturgical drama as the language of power itself. The record appears polished because empires are polished. It appears grand because domination often arrives in grand form. It appears catchy because dangerous ideas are most effective when people can sing along.
Tobias Forge remains the architect, but the continued presence of the Nameless Ghouls as an anonymous musical force remains central to GHOST’s mystique. That anonymity is not just branding. It reinforces the institution. GHOST do not operate like an ordinary rock band where every member is presented as a clearly defined public personality. They operate like a clergy, a transmission, a theatrical order. That makes IMPERA’s empire theme feel even more organic. The band’s structure mirrors the subject: faces hidden, roles assigned, rituals maintained, the machine larger than any one visible body.
For listeners who discovered GHOST through the heavier occult-metal atmosphere of Opus Eponymous, the road to IMPERA may feel almost impossibly bright. But that brightness is not betrayal. It is strategy. GHOST have moved steadily toward bigger choruses, cleaner hooks, and grander presentation because their subject matter has grown to match that scale. An album about empire should not sound small. It should gleam. It should overwhelm. It should make the listener feel the appeal of the thing being condemned.
That is GHOST’s most delicious contradiction. They warn against spectacle by becoming spectacular. They critique devotion by inspiring it. They mock the machinery of power while building one of the most recognizable theatrical identities in modern rock. IMPERA seems ready to lean all the way into that contradiction, and that may be exactly why it feels so promising one week before release.
If ‘Prequelle‘ was GHOST dancing with death, IMPERA looks prepared to stand in the throne room and ask why humanity keeps building systems destined to devour themselves. It is an album about imperial cycles, but also about personal ones: the empires of ego, belief, fear, certainty, desire, and self-deception. Civilizations collapse, but so do people. Institutions rot, but so do souls. GHOST know that the same impulse that builds a monument can also build a prison.
With IMPERA, GHOST appear poised to deliver one of their most ambitious and conceptually unified records: grand, melodic, sinister, satirical, and dressed in the kind of hard-rock splendor that makes decline feel almost divine. The album has not yet fully opened its gates, but the smoke is already visible above the walls. And if history has taught us anything, it is that when an empire sounds this confident, the fall has probably already begun.
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