Ghost frontman Tobias Forge has revealed that the band’s next touring cycle will expand into a wider variety of continents, and hinted that “good change” is coming for the Swedish metal group.
Forge spoke of Ghost’s intentions for 2023 and beyond in an interview with Metal Hammer published on Friday (December 6). Forge said that Ghost’s next touring cycle will encompass “a little bit of everywhere”, broadening the band’s typical schedule which only includes legs in America and Europe.
“We’re doing a lot of touring again,” Forge said. “On previous album cycles we’ve done four legs in America and two or three in Europe and repeated. We are going to do a little bit of everywhere. There’ll be a little bit of something up in upper Asia, on the far end there – a very well-established country with a lot of pop cultural fascination, and the home of video games.”
On top of an Asian tour, Forge teased an additional leg somewhere “in the Oceania world” as well as shows both south and north of Panama. “It feels pretty solid”, Forge said of Ghost’s upcoming tour plans. While those prospective shows have yet to be officially announced, Ghost are set to embark upon an already announced European tour in May.
That run of shows, which wraps up in Finland in July, will mark the band’s latest European leg following their tour of the region across April and May of last year. Those dates were in support of ‘Impera’, Ghost’s fifth studio album, which was released in March 2022. Elsewhere in the Metal Hammer interview, Forge discussed what fans can expect for the band’s future projects.
“We’re going to come out with a little bit of change before [the expanded tour] – good change”, he said. “We’re not going to go silent. Some things are public, other things not in public view, but there are a lot of things brewing.”
Forge’s comments around change echo that he made last November, when he told Rolling Stone that he’s “trying to build a new vibe for writing this record”. He elaborated: “There are a lot of things in my head that I feel like I want to explore… I want to evoke a few good things from the past and try to eradicate some of the things I didn’t like.”
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In a four-star review of ‘Impera’, NME said the album “is a truly delicious pop-rock proposition” which sees Ghost “go bigger than ever”.