GHOST
Tobias Forge spent another year converting the masses. His next ambition? Scuba diving!
WORDS: MERLIN ALDERSLADE
The last time Hammer spoke to Tobias Forge, back in February at a posh hotel in London, he revealed he was recovering from a period of extreme burnout. It turned out that juggling an exhaustive world tour, a concert movie – Rite Here Rite Now – and writing/recording sessions for the next album was a lot, and the ever-ambitious Ghost mainman explained that, come the end of 2024, he had “hit a wall”.
At the end of 2025, Ghost now have another acclaimed album under their belt – the bombastic and fantastic Skeletá, released in April – along with another couple of legs of another world tour, with more dates already announced. So, to ask the obvious question: how is he handling it all?
“I feel like I’ve committed to just about enough stuff,” he answers, after a trademark thoughtful pause. “I took that [burned out] condition seriously – those feelings are to be reckoned with. The level that we’re touring, it’s very comfy, even though my feelings of being burned out had very little to do with ‘comfortability’. But we’ve decided to not tour as hectically as we’ve done. The schedule isn’t as straining as it has been, and we are not going out on eight-, nine-week tours now. So we’ve done pretty well; I don’t feel the same strain at all.”