Ghost frontman Tobias Forge is one of the breakout metal stars of the last 15 years. But before he dragged the masked Swedish sensations out of the underground and onto arena stages around the world, he was a dyed-in-the-wool extreme metal fan.
As a kid growing up in the 80s, he was introduced to bands such as Kiss and Mötley Crüe by his older brother, Sebastian, but he soon discovered darker and heavier music, ranging from Misfits and Metallica to Venom and Bathory.
By the early 1990s, he’d immersed himself in the vibrant death and black metal scenes, even forming his own black metal band, Absurdum, when he was in his mid-teens. As the years progressed, he passed through countless different bands and musical styles, including death metallers Repugnant, hair metal peacocks Crashdiet, punk provocateurs Onkel Kånkel and alt-rockers Subvision.
Throughout it all, though, he always kept his underground roots close to his heart. Speaking to Metal Hammer in 2019, Tobias made the point that the best extreme metal was made by youthful bands.
“Most good music in metal, especially in extreme metal, is made by very young, youthful individuals,” he said. “There is something very different to the fire and excitement of a young mind that you don’t often get by people that have matured and, dare I say it, mellowed.”
For Tobias, there was one album in particular that embodied this idea – a cult 80s classic recorded by a bunch of teenagers from the Bay Area that helped shape the entire death and black metal scenes that followed.
Released in 1985, Possessed’s debut album Seven Churches took the thrash template laid down by fellow Bay Area natives Metallica and Exodus and pushed it to the extreme. Raw and brutal, and featuring throat-shredding proto-death metal growls from singer Jeff Becerra, songs such as The Exorcist, Pentagram and the genre-naming Death Metal were even more remarkable because of the young age of the band – Becerra and guitarist Larry Lalonde (who would go on to join Primus) were just 16 when it was recorded.
“Seven Churches is the perfect encapsulation of youthful anger,” Tobias told Metal Hammer of the album’s impact on him. “The production may sound a little unrefined to an audience of today, but that is how I like my metal to sound. When the production of death metal began to change in the mid-90s, that’s when I started to go, ‘Yuk!’ I hated it, and it’s
why I find myself returning to albums like this.”
At a time when the likes of Slayer and even Metallica were viewed with suspicion by many metal fans, Possessed were just too extreme for mainstream success. The band released just one more album, 1986’s more technical Beyond The Gates, and the following year’s The Eyes Of Horror EP, before splitting. But Seven Churches would become a huge inspiration on the wave of death and black metal scenes during the late 80s and early 90s – and the young Tobias Forge was among them.
“All I can say is that it still sounds feral and true and savage and full of life to this very day,” he says. “And, if I’m going to indulge in something truly extreme, this would be one of my first ports of call!”
