Ghost will perform on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon next week

Papa V Perpetua of Ghost in 2025
(Image credit: Mikael Eriksson)

Ghost have announced that they’ll play on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon next week.

Taking to social media, Tobias Forge’s masked devil church confirmed on Thursday (July 17) that they’ll return to late-night TV on Wednesday, July 23. The song that they’ll play is currently unknown, but it will likely be something from new album Skeletá, which came out in April.

The band wrote: “We wish to inform you that Ghost is prepared to put the ROCK in 30 Rock. Haunting Studio 6B, Wednesday, July 23, for their Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon debut! Everybody knows, in the middle of the night it feeds!”

This won’t be the first time Ghost have graced national American airwaves. On Halloween in 2015, they appeared on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to play the single Cirice. The performance included Forge (assuming his then-persona of Papa Emeritus III) ‘hypnotising’ members of Colbert’s audience, before ‘zombies’ rushed onto the stage.

Heavy metal has had a surprisingly fruitful relationship with US late night shows over the past year. In September 2024, Linkin Park appeared on The Tonight Show to play The Emptiness Machine from their comeback album From Zero, which came out in November.

In November, hardcore band Knocked Loose appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to play their then-Grammy-nominated hardcore bruiser Suffocate with Poppy and annoyed more pearl-clutching sections of the programme’s audience. Then, in early December, Ice-T’s rap metal iconoclasts Body Count were announced for a Tonight Show slot.

Last week, Canadian metalcore favourites Spiritbox played Jimmy Kimmel Live! and brought out one of the heaviest tracks from their new album Tsunami Sea, Soft Spine.

Ghost are currently touring North America as part of their worldwide Skeletour and will perform at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania tonight (July 18).

The band ignited many headlines when they announced last year that the tour will be entirely phone-free, with attendees needing to put their mobile phones into magnetically sealed bags that will be kept on their person. The only way for the bag to be unsealed is by a member of security as the attendee leaves the auditorium.

Forge, who founded Ghost in 2006 and is its sole constant member, explained the phone ban in a March interview. “It’s an experiment,” he told Audacy. “Over the years it’s gone absolutely insane. If you have 10,000 people at a concert and 8,000 of them are holding a phone, there’s something deeply disconnected.”

Earlier this month, Forge said that the ban has “paid off” for Ghost and called it a “life changer for the existence of the band”.

Matt Mills
Contributing Editor, Metal Hammer

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Metal Hammer and Prog, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, NME and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

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