The long-awaited Skeleta has arrived. Lucky fans in participating cities rejoiced when sales began at midnight in their favorite satanized record haunts. Others spent hours intently staring at Spotify countdowns – and some, meanwhile, will only stumble across it in their “New Releases” playlists next week. However it reaches the faithful, Ghost’s latest offers more than any other entry in their discography; teased as the collective’s most personal album to date, Skeleta doesn’t shy away from its own richly imagined inner world. Still, it opens with a graceful bow to IMPERA – the band’s last record, which narrated the fall of an empire – through “Peacefields,” where a ‘slaughtered czar’ and the ‘end of a monarchy’ appear briefly: not as the message, but as its backdrop. This is the last a listener will hear of royal intrigues before departing the land of past releases to accompany Ghost on their most ambitious endeavor yet.
It’s no secret that we’ve come to expect emotional vulnerability to arrive in hushed tones: perhaps some Mitski to soothe our childhood wounds, some Elliott Smith for late-night soul-searching. With Skeleta, Ghost flips the expectation of quietness as an eternal companion of emotional rawness. The album’s openness about the human condition is Broadway-level loud – and yes, unapologetically flashy. The band doesn’t strip down to get personal: they go full glam, draping themselves in purple robes, rhinestones and that signature shimmer of the ‘80s rock, making the personal feel louder than ever. One can ignore a single acoustic strum, a whispered confession. Sincerity arriving with the flash and a bang of a meteor is undeniable.
This is not Ghost’s first foray into intimacy either. Even the grandiose IMPERA left room for reflection: “Spillways” spoke to the universal darkness we harbor inside, while the ambiguous tenderness in “Darkness At The Heart Of My Love” blurred the line between the devotion of an imperfect lover and rare honesty of a false prophet. Skeleta brings that emotional thread to the surface, making it the core of the record. Instead of walking through the ruins of an empire or surveying the aftermath of a plague, it descends into the depths of grief, self-deception, love and mortality, only to rise with a surprisingly uncomplicated message: you’re alive – make it count.
Tobias Forge’s vocals shine as an undeniable highlight of the record. On “Lachryma,” heavy guitar riffage gives way to, perhaps for the first time in the band’s history, a disarmingly delicate falsetto glittering through the layered melody. This choice alone is a quiet yet potent sign of how Forge has grown into the voice of Ghost: better known for a sound marrying a hiss, whisper and low growl clawing their way out on “Mummy Dust” or “Respite On The Spitalfields,” he now reaches into previously unexplored territory. Ghost’s past frontmen have never sounded so emotionally nuanced and unafraid of a public cry: on “Excelsis,” Forge is unsure, pleading, almost mortified to be uttering the words he chose, but not devoid of tentative hope; on “Guiding Lights,” he lets his voice tremble a little, pushes it to stumble ever-so-slightly over regret written into the chorus. These tonal choices are not just made – they are earned with the control and craftsmanship worthy of a seasoned actor.
Another notable development pertains to the structure of the album: Skeleta omits the fully instrumental tracks Ghost usually favors as playgrounds for arrangement. This does not, however, make the album’s composition any less artful. Sonic ornaments are now tucked inside the lyrics and bookend choruses, filling Skeleta with unexpected treasures discovered by a listener in an Easter egg hunt-like fashion: a stunning choral theme on one track, a crisp synthwave tune in the middle of another. Synth, in particular, makes its gothic resonance known throughout the record. While rarely being center-stage, it inevitably leaves one with a darkwave-esque aftertaste from a set of songs supposedly influenced by pop. Far from a disappointment, the band honors the era already fueling their creativity — the ‘80s — by further making its characteristic elements their own and doing so with measured confidence.
As always with Ghost, Skeleta opens itself up beyond clever sonic and lyrical choices. Its revelations arrive through Papa V Perpetua, the latest incarnation of Ghost’s frontman. The intentionality behind the design is hard to ignore: a practical half-mask that replaced full-face casts worn by previous Papas hints both at greater ease for live performance and the thinning divide between Tobias Forge and the stage persona he wears. Combine this with Forge’s assertion that the lore might come to a close soon, and suddenly, you’re not just looking at the next Papa whose name echoes “perpetual” for those listening too closely: you might be looking at the last one. And this, for Ghost, is the real uncharted territory: for a band that spent its existence riding a cycle of death and rebirth, what does it mean to escape Samsara?
In these unprecedented times, one has no choice but to trust in the ghoulish hand leading them through the uncertainty. It’s not the endless soap opera that has kept the project alive for two decades, but Forge’s instinctual understanding of the cultural landscape, often anticipating what the public needs before they know it themselves. Perhaps this new chapter arrives not out of desire, but out of necessity. The Skeleta world tour is set to be a phone-free experience in a clear effort to pull the crowd into the here-and-now – a space that we rarely occupy anymore; and the unveiling of Papa V Perpetua, in this context, feels like a deliberate push against the incessantly shortening attention span. Instead of another act of reincarnation, Ghost may be preparing for a new lesson, and it’s one in stillness.
Perhaps the real trick, after all, was not to rise again, but to stay.
Arina Zadvornaya is a graduate student in the College of Engineering. She can be reached at az499@cornell.edu.
