Rating: 9 / 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 – Before GHOST open the doors to Skeletá on April 25, 2025, there is a strange and fitting contradiction hanging over the whole thing: the album begins with an angelic choir, yet this is still GHOST, still Tobias Forge’s grand upside-down church, still a band that has spent nearly two decades making blasphemy feel like Broadway, Satanism feel like salvation, and arena rock feel like a ritual conducted under stained glass at midnight. Set to arrive via Loma Vista Recordings, Skeletá stands as GHOST’s sixth studio album and the first full-length of new material since 2022’s IMPERA, with its ten-song track listing moving from “Peacefield” through the closing “Excelsis.”
If IMPERA was GHOST gazing outward at empire, power, corruption, and collapse, Skeletá appears to turn the blade inward. The title alone suggests structure beneath the flesh, the frame that remains when spectacle is stripped away. That is important, because GHOST have always been a band of surfaces that reveal deeper rot: masks, mitres, robes, characters, symbols, and ceremonies that are deliberately extravagant, yet rarely empty. On Skeletá, Forge seems less interested in the external machinery of civilization and more drawn toward the internal architecture of despair, temptation, memory, mortality, and spiritual unrest.
The record arrives under the newly anointed figure of Papa V Perpetua, Forge’s latest papal guise, and that transition matters. GHOST’s frontmen are never just costumes. They are eras. They are tonal signals. They tell the listener what kind of sermon is about to be delivered. Where previous incarnations have embodied plague, empire, decadence, and sinister seduction, Papa V Perpetua feels positioned as a messenger of inner crisis. Apple Music’s album notes describe several songs as addressing a listener experiencing turmoil, which fits the album’s emerging emotional center: not conquest, not apocalypse, but the private battlefield inside the soul.
The opener “Peacefield” begins with that luminous choir, a sound that could be read as holy if GHOST did not constantly remind us that holiness is often only a matter of perspective. From there, the song rises into the kind of soaring, wide-screen hard rock that Forge has been refining for years. GHOST’s gift has always been their ability to make the profane sound devotional, and “Peacefield” seems designed to welcome the congregation with arms open wide before gently revealing that the sanctuary may not be safe. The title itself suggests calm, but in GHOST’s universe peace is rarely uncomplicated. It is something longed for, staged, promised, or corrupted.
“Lachryma” follows with darker bite. Built around the idea of crying vampires, the song seems to pull from gothic melodrama, classic metal, and neon-lit ’80s atmosphere, as if King Diamond had wandered into a new wave club and decided the dance floor needed more blood. Forge has called it one of his favorite songs, and it is easy to understand why. “Lachryma” sounds like the kind of GHOST track that understands camp not as comedy, but as emotional exaggeration sharpened into grandeur. Vampires crying is a ridiculous image until GHOST make it tragic, seductive, and strangely human.
Then comes “Satanized,” the lead single and the album’s most immediate act of possession. GHOST announced Skeletá alongside “Satanized,” introducing Papa V Perpetua and the song’s interactive video experience, “The Satanizer.” But the song itself is more than a clever campaign piece. It is a hook-driven confession of inner corruption, guided by Latin chants, a throbbing bassline, and the kind of chorus that makes heresy feel communal. The brilliance of “Satanized” is that it does not treat demonic possession as an outside invasion. It sounds like a recognition. Something was already inside. The song merely gives it a name.
“Guiding Lights” appears to offer one of the album’s more vulnerable turns. In the context of Skeletá, the title suggests direction, rescue, and the fragile hope that someone or something might still be visible through the dark. GHOST are often at their strongest when they allow sincerity to exist inside the theatrical frame. The band’s most emotionally resonant songs are not the ones that abandon spectacle, but the ones that let human longing shine through it. “Guiding Lights” seems poised to occupy that space: part hymn, part plea, part hard-rock confession.
“De Profundis Borealis” opens with somber piano before triumphant guitars break through, according to Apple Music’s album notes, and that contrast feels central to the entire record. The title invokes depths, coldness, and northern darkness, but the song appears built around ascent. GHOST have always understood the drama of emergence: the organ swell, the guitar lift, the voice rising from shadow into declaration. Here, that drama seems less about theatrical evil and more about emotional survival. If Skeletá is truly an inward journey, “De Profundis Borealis” may be one of its key staircases out of the cellar.
“Cenotaph” brings death into the architecture more explicitly. A cenotaph is a monument to someone buried elsewhere, which makes the title perfect for GHOST: grief without a body, remembrance without closure, a structure built around absence. Musically, the song has been described as riding a sawed-off Metallica-like riff into a colorful vocal melody with classic-rock guitar accents. That combination is very GHOST: blunt metallic force undercut by melodic brightness, mourning turned into pageantry, a memorial that somehow still wants to dance.
“Missilia Amori” may be one of the more intriguing titles here. Translating loosely into the language of love and missiles, or affection weaponized, it suggests the kind of emotional contradiction GHOST thrive on. Love in Forge’s writing is rarely simple. It can be salvation, manipulation, obsession, poison, invitation, or trap. Within Skeletá’s apparent focus on inner demons and personal reckoning, “Missilia Amori” feels like it may explore affection as impact: the things launched at us in the name of devotion, the wounds disguised as gifts, the beautiful projectiles that leave craters.
“Marks of the Evil One” returns to one of Forge’s favorite figures, Lucifer, and seems positioned as a stomping, jubilant invocation. GHOST have always been more interesting than simple shock-rock Satanism because their devil is not merely an antagonist. He is metaphor, liberator, tempter, mirror, punchline, and patron saint of the outsider all at once. “Marks of the Evil One” appears to tap into the band’s most celebratory infernal energy, the side of GHOST that turns damnation into a parade and makes the congregation clap along as if damnation might be the only honest church left.
“Umbra” suggests shadow, and GHOST are masters of shadow not just as darkness, but as companion. The shadow follows because it belongs to the body. It cannot be exorcised without removing the self that casts it. In the emotional language of Skeletá, “Umbra” feels likely to carry the album’s deepest confrontation with what remains hidden, repressed, or half-acknowledged. GHOST’s most compelling darkness is rarely external. It is the darkness that recognizes you.
The closing track, “Excelsis,” appears ready to give Skeletá its final ascension. Apple Music frames it as a sober meditation on death with a vocal line carrying the sweep of award-winning musical theater, and that sounds almost too perfectly GHOST to be accidental. Forge has always blurred the boundary between metal, pop, liturgy, and stagecraft. If “Excelsis” is indeed the album’s final statement, then it may offer not a simple ending, but a theatrical elevation: death not as silence, but as a final note held beneath cathedral lights.
What makes Skeletá feel so promising one week before its release is that it seems to understand where GHOST are strongest in this phase of their career. The band no longer needs to prove that occult rock can become arena rock. They have already done that. They no longer need to prove that satanic imagery can coexist with massive hooks, pop instincts, and theatrical grandeur. They have done that too. The more important question now is whether GHOST can keep finding emotional necessity inside the ritual.
Forge himself seems aware of that pressure. In the Apple Music interview material surrounding Skeletá, he pushes back against the idea of creating merely to fulfill obligation, describing each new album and tour as a new existence that must be loved and lived with. That sentiment matters because Skeletá does not appear to be GHOST coasting on iconography. It appears to be a record about why the iconography still matters: because beneath the robes and skull paint and satanic theatre, there is still a human being trying to make sense of fear, grief, desire, death, and the unbearable intimacy of one’s own demons.
GHOST’s greatest trick has always been making contradiction feel sacred. Skeletá looks ready to continue that tradition with an album that is angelic and infernal, theatrical and personal, polished and haunted, absurd and sincere. Its songs seem to move through possession, mourning, temptation, guidance, mortality, and self-recognition, all while dressed in the kind of irresistible melodic armor that has made GHOST one of modern rock’s most singular institutions.
One week out, the candles are lit. Papa V Perpetua is at the pulpit. The choir is warming its voices. The faithful are gathering. And if Skeletá truly cuts as close to the bone as its title promises, GHOST may be preparing not just another sermon, but one of their most revealing rituals yet.
For more information on GHOST, visit:
www.Ghost-Official.com
www.Facebook.com/TheBandGhost
www.X.com/TheBandGhost
www.Instagram.com/TheBandGhost
www.YouTube.com/@TheBandGhost
www.Spotify.com/Artist/Ghost
