GHOST frontman Tobias Forge has told Kerrang! that the band’s new song “Grift Wood”, off of their upcoming release “Impera”, is about Donald Trump-era U.S. vice president Mike Pence.
“That song’s about him and anyone like him who’s willing to soil everything they’ve worked for,” Forge said. “They definitely qualify for a front-row ticket to Hell. Which is so ironic, because that’s what they believe in. [People like that] completely demean themselves, and just eat shit out of someone’s ass in order to achieve whatever they’re trying to achieve.
“Again, he stands as a symbol for people of all times, where the end game is wrapped with some sort of religious [thing],” Tobias continued. “He’s known as this sort of Bible thumper, believing that he has strong faith, and he’s just this awful, awful person in any way. He tries to tell the world that he serves God, that he’s part of the good side. Whereas at the end of the day, the only thing he wants is power. But it doesn’t have to necessarily be all about him. It’s about people like him: a lot of politicians, lot of preachers, a lot of clergymen throughout the history of time.”
In other GHOST news, the band kicked off their co-headlining tour with VOLBEAT this past Tuesday night (January 25) at the Reno Events Center in Reno, Nevada. GHOST debuted a new song from their upcoming “Impera” album, called “Kaisarion” which you can now watch in multi-camera fan-filmed video below.
Forge tells Kerrang! about “Kaisarion”: “There was a building called Caesareum in ancient Alexandria. Roughly what happened was that the teacher and philosopher, Hypatia, was murdered by Christians. She was molested and murdered inside the building, because of her pagan beliefs, because she was a believer in science and real things. This was in the beginning stages of Christianity, when it was just an insane cult, before it got the mandate of a book put together by Romans in 325 to harness that shit. This was like an underground group of terrorists, basically, who couldn’t stand to see some female smartass preaching or telling people that the world wasn’t flat. And it didn’t happen at the same time, but they also burned down the big library in Alexandria, which must have been an enormous, enormous loss for mankind in terms of knowledge and historic accounts. There you go — for the greater good.
“I think that’s a nice symbol for what you can see now,” he said. “You can see likenesses of it in public book burnings and stoning and killing everything that doesn’t match with a sort of a flat Earth reality that some people live in. Or storming the Capitol and wanting to hang people. It’s a symbol for those sorts of movements that are always targeting smartness and enlightenment, and thinking.”
GHOST’s 26-date co-headlining U.S. arena tour with VOLBEAT and special guests TWIN TEMPLE wraps up on March 3 in Anaheim, California.
GHOST will release their fifth album, “Impera”, on March 11 via Loma Vista/Concord.
