Prequelle by Ghost

Prequelle, Ghost's fourth studio album, arrived on 1 June 2018 on Spinefarm with Tom Dalgety producing, and it's the record where the Swedish anti-pope pageant went full arena spectacle. Tobias Forge, unmasked as the man behind the band the year before, fronts a record obsessed with medieval times and the Black Death, while slipping some present-day dread in between the plague sores.

The music is pure showbiz metal: hard rock riffs, gleaming pop hooks and big stadium choruses, all played with a wink and a straight face at once. "Rats" came out first, in April, and sat at number one on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart for seven weeks; "Dance Macabre" later topped the same chart for two. The album landed at number 3 on the Billboard 200 with 66,000 copies in its first week, their best start yet, and picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album. Even the sleeve played games: five covers, each with the horse and rider in a different spot.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.