Pick up Ghost vinyl, action figures, merch and more — including their new album Impera on vinyl, CD and cassette — over at our shop.
As if we weren't already excited for Ghost's new album Impera, which they announced last week alongside an awesome new song titled "Call Me Little Sunshine," now band leader Tobias Forge has revealed that a certain world-renowned guitarist appears within the tracklist. In a new interview with Loudwire, Forge mentioned that Fredrik Åkesson, longtime shredder of the Swedish prog-metal titans Opeth, contributed performances to Impera.
"...I'm a little bit of a jack of all trades when it comes to actual playing," Forge said. "I'm an able drummer, a bass player, an able guitar player, but I'm not a virtuoso.
"This time around, I actually had another guitar player coming in, mounting the massive work of actually redoing everything. I've played guitar all my life, but, unlike most guitar players who are in successful bands, they play as they tour. I am doing a whole slew of other things, so, it almost feels like every time I saw start writing again, and demoing and doing pre-production, I quickly have to go up to par again.
"On, tour for example, I mostly play drums, actually, in a rehearsal room in the back that we usually do as a warm up. Part of my daily exercises, I play drums for an hour, but I tend to forget to play guitar. When making this record, the demos dictates what to play — you can always figure that out and there's always ways to redo, undo and piece things together.
"But when it came to actually performing, I had a friend of mine, Fredrik Åkesson, the guitar player from Opeth. He's the sort of person who plays five hours every day. He's so amazingly talented. He can play circles around anything that I put on tape and he can do it with flair."
As Metal Injection points out, this isn't the first time that a member of Opeth contributed to a Ghost project. Frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt played acoustic guitar on the song "Helvetesfönster" from 2018's Prequelle, but from the way Forge tells it, it seems like Åkesson has more of a presence on the highly-anticipated Impera.
