Ghost mastermind Tobias Forge has experienced an uncanny run of predicting current events. Just after the finale of the album cycle for Prequelle (an album centered around an oncoming plague) COVID-19 hit and shut down the globe. Now, with Impera, Forge is releasing a record concerning the greed and eventual fall of empires as Russia has invaded neighboring Ukraine.

We recently teamed up with KLAQ 95.5 in El Paso, Texas to film an interview with Forge. The chat quickly took a serious turn concerning the Russian invasion, but Forge fancies himself more of a historian than a soothsayer.

“We have distanced ourselves from the actual circularity of things and the cyclic nature of everything,” Forge says. “Therefore it comes as a shock to us that something as barbaric and old-school as war and the threat of war and the threat of authoritarianism and Biblical wrath or pandemics… it actually comes every now and then, as they’ve always done, as they always will. The circularity I’ve been trying to talk about just happens to coincide now with what eventually will fall… the empire [Russia] that will fall because of this, I think, and hope.”

He continues, “I already knew several years ago that I was going to make, at some point, a record about empires. It’s about the repetitive nature of empires in general and how their self-destruction mechanisms are to blame for its ultimate destruction and annihilation.”

Forge also pondered a little about Vladimir Putin’s inner motivations. “I’m a nostalgic person myself. When I go into my inner sanctum, it’s the days before Internet, it’s VHS, and I’m far away from every responsibility. I’m just watching VHS films with the stereo on at the same time, sitting and drawing. That’s my safe place. Same way on the other side of the world, there’s this guy that dreams of grey skies and an old Soviet Union where he was a KGB officer and maybe he got a little more sense of purpose breaking people’s arms… whatever he did, I have no idea, but maybe that was his happy place, the same way that I dream of the summer of 1993 being one of my happy places.”

Ghost's Tobias Forge - Putin, Fall of Empires, New Album + More

Check out our full interview with Tobias Forge above and click here to pre-order a copy of Impera, coming out March 11.

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