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Back before Ghost — long before the Grammy nominations, TikTok fame and blockbuster arena shows — Tobias Forge fronted a Swedish death metal band called Repugnant. Obviously, once Ghost began in the early 2010s, Forge pivoted from extreme-metal to pop-minded doom, but in a new interview with Loudwire, Forge suggests that he's interested in one day returning to his death-metal roots.
He's just not sure what that would look like (it certainly wouldn't be under the Ghost moniker), but he definitely still has an adoration for those heavier stylings and feels "that sort of urge" to one day make blasty, screamy, gore-filled music again.
"I love that stuff. I listen to it a lot. I'm still obsessing over it from a collecting point of view," Forge said of death metal, as transcribed by Metal Injection. "That's very much where my adolescent heart is. I grew up with a lot of music, but my adolescence was completely immersed and completely swamped with that impression.
"I still get the same kick out of things that I liked as a — not even a teenager; as an 11, 12-year-old, when I really started listening to that and when death metal was this really dangerous animal that you can just go to this one store to find. And I'm still sort of chasing that.
"I have my safe spot inside where all that is, and, of course, it's materialized in a lot of physical things that I'm collecting. But I still feel that sort of urge to, in some way or form, partake in it. But I don't know in what form it will materialize."
Later in the interview, he clarifies that his time as a death metal artist was never a professional endeavor, and if he ever decides to do something in that vein again, he'd want to take it a little more seriously — not just fuck around in a basement, getting drunk and breaking equipment.
"I think that there's another conflict… Since I never really did it professionally… Or let's be real — I never did it professionally; it was very unprofessional in every way. That is not exactly what I wanna do. I don't wanna have sort of messed up rehearsals where we end up drinking instead and you end up coming to a show with a plastic bag and a broken pedal and you have to borrow cords from other bands and then you end up playing a really drunk show in front of 20 friends. Which is fun as fuck, but as a grown-up...
"It's kind of like in [Pink Floyd's] 'Comfortably Numb' where he sings, 'That child is gone. I can't feel that way.' I can't paraphrase what he's singing in that, but he says it in such a great way where you know it's there, but it will never feel the same. You can never be re-virginized [laughs] for real. But I live on hope. So I think that there will be a time for that rockage, too. But it will not necessarily be the way it was."
See Forge's full interview below.
