Ghost, “SKELETÁ.”

One wonders how much panic is happening around Skeletá, the latest album by Ghost. Not because it’s not good—it’s very good—but because of an awkward coincidence.

See, Ghost is as much performance art as a band. It’s based around the United Clergy of Ghost, a Satanic church tasked with destroying Christianity, that uses the band to try to achieve that end. The band’s frontmen (all played by Ghost’s mastermind Tobias Forge) are named Papa Emeritus and dress like an evil Pope with skull paint.

As per tradition, a new album comes with a new Papa Emeritus, this time Papa V Perpetua. That’s where the awkwardness comes in since, with the death of Pope Francis in the same week as the album’s release, some could consider the optics of naming a new Satanic antipope to be negative.

The good news is that I’m not a publicist for the band, so I can just enjoy an excellent album and not worry about it.

Due to the symbolic replacement of the frontmen, Ghost has been defined by constant reinvention. Each album has had a unique style because each character has his own personality that shines through. Cardinal Copia, for example, had a more casual lounge singer energy on the more pop-oriented Prequelle. On the other hand, Papa Emeritus II was an angry, bitter old man, and his album Infestissumam leaned far more toward doom metal as a result.

Papa V Perpetua’s personality isn’t known publicly yet, but based on the name, one suspects he may stick around beyond the traditional one album cycle. If that’s the case, an aversion to boxing the band in creatively could explain why Skeletá doesn’t have the signature reinvention. Each song would fit in on one of the previous albums, which I thought would bother me, but in practice, it’s refreshing to get new music in styles I didn’t think I’d hear again.

For example, single “Satanized” comes in the mold of 2018’s Prequelle: hard rock with a catchy beat and a chorus that gets stuck in your head immediately. “De Profundis Borealis” on the other hand is reminiscent of 2015’s Meliora, with a harder edge and speed-metal-inspired guitars.

The songs still flow together, however. The differences in style aren’t deep enough that they’re not all decisively Ghost songs both sonically and thematically. None of the transitions are jarring and none of the songs feel out of place. At the back end of the album, “Missilia Amori” leans more toward doom metal, followed by “Marks of the Evil One,” with an eerier and ethereal vibe. “Umbra” opens with ’80s horror movie synths. Despite the differences, each song leads into the other effectively. In the era of streaming and singles, it’s refreshing to hear an album where care is put into track order.

The highlight is probably “Lachryma,” which manages to be all of Ghost’s styles at once. I’m not sure how that’s possible, but if you listen to it, you can hear pieces of everything from Opus Eponymous‘ psychedelic doom metal to Impera’s ’80s pop-rock all at the same time. If you’d asked me before hearing it to define what a Ghost song is, I’d have struggled because of the shifting influences, but “Lachryma” is it.

All that said, it’s a bit disappointing that we didn’t get the opportunity to find out what else Forge can do. There are so many more genres to explore, so many strange things to mix with heavy metal, and Skeletá is more a summation of everything that came before. It’s possible that he’s done all that he wants to do, and the goal from here on out is to make music within the range he defined, but that would be an unexpected turn of events.

If this is it, though? If we’re going to continue to get albums like Skeletá until Papa V Perpetua or some future member of the Emeritus line decides to hang it up? That would be great. Absolutely no arguments or complaints.

Follow publisher Daniel J. Willis at @bayareadata.press on BlueSky.