Ghost’s Tobias Forge has always had a knack for combining blasphemous lyrical imagery with the sweetest of musical caresses. If anyone could infiltrate the social media mainstream with a song that, on the face of it, combined sacrilege with slick pop-rock hooks, it was him.
And so it proved with viral success of Mary on a Cross. In September 2022, a TikTok user uploaded a slowed-down, reverb-heavy version of the three-year-old song to soundtrack a compilation of Stranger Things scenes. It blew up and before long there were more than 300,000 TikTok vids using either the original or alternative iteration of the track. It also propelled the band into the US Billboard Hot 100 chart for the first time, subsequently becoming the band’s most listened-to song, currently sitting pretty with more than 210 million streams on Spotify.
