Ghost To Record New Album This Winter; Release It "After Summer" 2021

Despite a recent interview with Tobias Forge pointing to Ghost releasing their new album "this winter", the frontman has now stated that he'll be writing material for the follow-up to 2018's Prequelle up until Christmas, with plans to release the album "after the summer" of 2021.

Speaking to Sweden Rock Magazine (via Blabbermouth), Ghost's mastermind reveals, "The plan now is for me to be here [in the studio] writing for another two months until Christmas."

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He continues: "The idea is for the album to be recorded in January. The actual recording will last around six weeks and then there's two to three weeks of mixing and mastering. So sometime in March the record should be finished, but it won't be released until after the summer."

Tobias adds that "we won't release an album until we know that we are actually going on tour", confirming that LP number five will "coincide with the start of a tour".

Alluding to the subject matter of Ghost's new effort, Tobias revealed earlier this month that he likely won't be addressing COVID-19 and the pandemic in any way. "I have already made a record about God’s wrath and doomsday, even if Prequelle was not about just infection from a medical perspective," he said. "But I have a feeling that there will be plenty of doomsday and quarantine-confirming records in the future, and I think I might not participate in it."

In a pre-coronavirus interview with Kerrang!, when asked about a new Ghost album in 2019, Tobias hinted: "I look at many fifth albums as a guide as to the urgency for what that record will need to be, with [Iron Maiden’s] Powerslave being a great example. By the fifth album you’re at a point in your career where you have this momentum built up, and you have the expectancy of people depending on you, so you have to put something special in those many spotlights. You need to step up and make a record that’s worth it and justifies all of these things."

He also pondered where a new record could take Ghost and how a huge tour slot supporting Metallica last year gave him food for thought: "I regard Metallica as colleagues and friends now, but they’re still Metallica. I am an ambassador and they are presidents. But when I look to Metallica for influence, I’m looking at what they did in 1988. We’re on our fourth album, as they were on the Damaged Justice Tour, so the next stop is the Black Album."

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