Tobias Forge, Ghost’s mastermind talked with The Pulse Of Radio about how he come up with the idea for the single “Rats”.
Read what he said:
“A few years agom I decided like, ‘I really want to have a big opening track that just blows people’s minds immediately.’ So I wrote ‘Square Hammer’ and that went well.
“But I didn’t want ‘Square Hammer’ to turn into ‘Start Me Up,’ where that always feels best to play first. I want to be able to mix it up. So we needed another song that works as an opening track. That was basically my intention with ‘Rats.'”
He also talked about the album with Revolver:
“It is loosely themed around the concept of death and doom. It’s a themed album around medieval times, but it’s definitely clinging onto a lot of very current things. The Black Death [plague] is a great example of a turning point for a whole civilization.”
“Complete villages were annihilated. Most people knew very little, so all of it was God or the Devil – and about their faith being questioned: Why are we being stricken down by this great scourge? It must be because of our not fearing God enough and all this superstitious bullshit.”
“There’s a lot that you would recognize today in online mannerisms. In many ways, we’ve gone back a few steps because now it’s closer to how it was back in the old days when people were standing at the square and all of a sudden, it’s like in Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’: ‘Stone him! Ra! Ra! Ra!’ Public trials are very unsupervised and extremely swift and speak to the most primordial parts of us.”