Boondall: Grammy-winning Swedish band Ghost will bring their “satanic” theatrical rock show to the Brisbane Entertainment Centre on Saturday night.

Ghost is best known in Australia for their epic goth-pop smash hit, “Mary On A Cross”, which was released in 2019 but didn’t make it to the ears of the country’s masses until last year when it went viral on Chinese video-sharing platform TikTok.

The band quickly became a household name for tweens and their families globally, with the song now boasting more than 440 million streams on Spotify.

Ghost has an impressive stage prowess with members dripping in twisted religious imagery, offering a spellbinding and infectious hype which is so ravenously adored by their herculean fanbase.

But while the band’s macabre theatrics might appear to be more akin to the kind you’d find at a Marilyn Manson concert, there’s a reason why these guys blew up overnight on the youth-focussed, social media app.

Stage acts such as drowning puppies have been swapped for confetti cannons and disco lights, and their Scandanavian black-metal offers more of a psychedelic pop-rock flavour, with heavier overtones.

It’s a little less doom and gloom, and a bit more cartoonish.

And it equates to something a bit more Metallica meets Placebo with a twist of 80s “glam hair”.

The Swedish sorcerers cover topics from history and wars to pandemics, and it’s all encased in pop-influenced hooks and guitar riffs, upbeat rock anthems, and slow power-ballads.

Ghost has enamoured and challenged the status quo throughout their career, with the man behind the mask – and lead singer/multi-instrumentalist – Tobias Forge starting the project in 2006.

But Forge said despite popular opinion his songs were not religious.

He told the Los Angeles Times: “The lyrics are not about God. They’re about man.”

“We are, at the end of the day, an occult, pop, satanic sort of rock ’n’ roll band meant to entertain a group of people who are already down with that stuff.”

Forge, who is the only original member of the band, plays the character of demonic pope Papa Emeritus IV, and is accompanied by an army of instrumentalists known as Nameless Ghouls.

His identity remained relatively unknown to mainstream music lovers until 2017 when Forge was publicly sued by former band members over a royalties dispute.

But that hasn’t stopped die-hard fans from loving his music, with Forge’s band now generating more than nine million monthly listeners on Spotify alone.

His band even snapped up the Breakthrough Band Award at the 2012 Metal Hammer Golden Gods Awards, and scored the top gong in US music, a Grammy Award, for Best Metal Performance in 2016 with single, “Cirice”.

Photo: Tobias Forge’s transformation into Papa Emeritus IV, by Loudwire.

Armed with five full-length albums and multiple EPs including, Phantomime, released in May, the new EP brandishes five fresh tracks putting new spins on songs by Television, Genesis, The Stranglers, Iron Maiden and Tina Turner.

Phantomime bridges the glistening foundations of the group’s internationally chart-topping 2022 album, Impera, which debuted at number one in a sweep of the US music album charts.

With an entire musical catalogue now in command of well over a billion streams, Ghost is a spectacle to see with a hulking, yet glamorous sonic output, and an expertly-crafted, otherworldly pantomime.

Ghost plays at Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Melaleuca Drive, Boondall, on Saturday, October 7. Tickets: https://premier.ticketek.com.au.

Feature photo credit: https://www.latimes.com.

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