GHOST mastermind Tobias Forge has given the clearest account yet of why the band has gone quiet, and the answer is not a split, a crisis or a health scare. He ran out of a reason to keep going, and decided that was reason enough to stop.
Speaking in a new cover story for the U.K.'s Kerrang!, Forge described finishing the "Skeletour" in February 2026 and, for the first time in GHOST's career, not knowing what came next.
"Everything was great up until the moment when I was sort of eyeing the end of a tour and not knowing for the first time in our career what to do next," he said. "And that was kind of the get-the-fuck-out-of-Dodge card, which is: I'm not gonna just go back to make an album or force myself to make an album for no reason. I need to want to make a record. I need to have something to say."
He drew a hard line between that and everything before it. "Every other record has been very inspired and there's been a clear thought, there's been a purpose. And that was completely generated by my passion to do so — it was never contractual fulfilment or whatever. And this time around it was just like, 'I don't have an idea.'"
What he wanted off his shoulders was the weight of other people's expectations. "There's a lot of people depending on you, let alone all these people buying tickets. For most of my career, I've been very triggered by that, in a positive way. But now, with a lack of a clear direction of where to go, I don't want to have that responsibility on my shoulder. I can carry that when I'm there, but when I'm not there, it's too tiresome."
The tour he is stepping back from was enormous — 70 shows across Europe, North America and Mexico, opening in Manchester in April 2025 and closing at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles on February 23, 2026. "Skeletá" had entered the Billboard 200 at No. 1 with 86,000 equivalent units, more than 44,000 of them vinyl, making it the first hard rock album to top that chart since AC/DC's "Power Up" in 2020.
Forge sounds entirely at peace with the possibility that this was the summit. "When you're done with the big wedding, you're not gonna get married again immediately after. I don't want to call it a bookend, but it serves as a great finale. If this is it, I'm pretty pleased. This is a fucking great repertoire, great band, they sound phenomenal."
He is careful with the word itself: "No, we don't have anything in the books, and yeah, it's just a normal hiatus."
One artefact of the Papa V Perpetua era does land now. "2 Big To Rig", GHOST's second feature film and second collaboration with Trafalgar Releasing, was shot on 16mm across two sold-out nights at Mexico City's Palacio De Los Deportes in September 2025, in front of nearly 40,000 people. Unlike 2024's "Rite Here Rite Now", it sticks to the performance — and it is the only pro-shot footage to escape an entirely phone-free tour.