“People were partying like there was no tomorrow because they were gonna die. It captures that joyous nocturnal life”: Ghost’s Tobias Forge wanted a song to match Queen. Instead, he wrote the greatest plague-inspired metal banger of the last 20 years

Ghost posing for a photograph in 2018.

“What I’ve tried to do is make Ghost a little more Queen than AC/DC,” Tobias Forge told Classic Rock of the ambition that drove his band’s fourth album, 2018’s Prequelle.

Ghost’s frontman was referring not just to the iconic British band’s sense of musical grandeur, but the fact that they would mix-and-match styles across their albums, from heavy rock blowouts and soaring ballads to operatic epics and even knockabout ragtime songs.