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Photo: Mikael Eriksson
Ghost's Tobias Forge has always had a knack for combining blasphemous lyrical imagery with the most tender musical caresses. If anyone could penetrate the social media mainstream with a song that, at first glance, combines sacrilege with elegant pop-rock hooks, it was him.
This is what happened thanks to the viral popularity of the song. Mary on a Cross . In September 2022, a TikTok user uploaded a slowed-down, reverb-heavy version of the three-year-old song as the soundtrack to a collection of scenes from the series. «Stranger Things» . It became a hit, and soon over 300,000 videos featuring the original or alternate versions of the track appeared on TikTok. It also allowed the band to enter the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US for the first time, subsequently becoming their most-streamed song, which now holds the top spot with over 210 million plays on Spotify.
According to the group's own mythology, song Mary On A Cross emerged in 1969, as an early version of Ghost waded into the psychedelic waves of the waning decade. Despite featuring a confident, handsome priest known as Papa Nihil as its lead singer, this fiery '60s incarnation of Ghost failed to conquer the world. It wasn't until Papa Nihil returned with the band in the 21st century, declaring himself Papa Emeritus Zero, that, Mary On A Cross and one more song, Kiss The Go-Goat , were retrieved from the archives and re-released in 2019 as a single Seven Inches of Satanic Panic .
Of course, this is complete nonsense, although funny. In fact, song Seven Inches of Satanic Panic was written and recorded after the album Prequelle 2018. It was a collaboration with the Swedish songwriting and production duo Salem Al Fakir and Vincent Pontare, known as Vargas & Lagola. The pair, who have previously worked with Madonna and Katy Perry, also co-wrote the tracks. Dance Macabre и Life Eternal с album Prequelle ; they teamed up with Forge again to work on albums Impera 2022 and Skeleton 2025.
Released on September 13, 2019 as the B-side of the single Seven Inches of Satanic Panic , song Mary On A Cross used a fictional backstory created by Forge. Backed by psychedelic garage rock and organ, it captured the late-'60s occult atmosphere depicted in the single's A-side video., Kiss The Go-Goat .
The lyrics of the song are ambiguous and full of ambiguous images. «We raced together along the dark avenues,” sang Forge. »But besides glory, only melancholy awaited us.”. The most striking lyrically is the chorus: «"You will fall like Saint Mary/Mary on the cross"» , - a seemingly provocative combination of biblical and sexual imagery.
Forge himself was reluctant to reveal the secret, though he acknowledged that one of his daughter's friends had heard the song was "twisted." On air with Mastodon's Brann Dailor, the singer explained: "There are many layers of meaning in the song's lyrics, and it's important for people to understand that. The chorus, of course, is written with a great deal of irony. 'Go down' doesn't necessarily mean 'make history,' your own ascension.".
«"Mary doesn't necessarily mean Mary, the mother of Jesus," he continued. "It could mean Mary Magdalene, the proclaimed prostitute who may have been Jesus' wife—simply as a symbol of someone who appeared to be one thing but actually had other intentions and did something else. Someone who is misattributed.".
He said the song is "more about friendship and how, when you're with someone else, you could once be something more, and then eventually just stop being what you were.".
Forge also wryly noted that his stage name in the death metal band Repugnant before Ghost was Mary Goor (actually a play on words referencing the late guitar hero Gary Moore). "So it has very little to do with the mother of Jesus, because I don't want anyone to believe she wasn't a virgin," he joked.
Despite the fact that Mary On A Cross Thought to be a little-known B-side track, it instantly became a staple of Ghost's live repertoire. But it was TikTok that significantly boosted the song's popularity—something Forge admits he never expected.
«I think my daughter was the first to notice,” Forge told the publication. Metal Hammer . - She said: „I heard Mary On A Cross "on TikTok." She'd done this before with other songs. Then I was called into a label meeting, and they asked, 'Are you aware of what's going on?' and started showing me the stats.".
The song's success attracted unwanted attention. Christian TikTok criticized the song, with one user calling themselves stand_.with._jesus declaring, "This is a terrible sound, disrespectful to the beauty of Christianity." User Jesus.rescues went even further, dissecting the song line by line. He suggested that the intention to associate sexual imagery with Christianity was more important than whether the song was truly about Saint Mary, calling it a "twisted mockery of the Christian faith.".
Considering that Forge built Ghost on precisely this kind of anti-religious provocation, it's likely he knew exactly what kind of reaction the song would provoke. Mary On A Cross . In an interview for Cutter's RockCast podcast The singer said the song's viral success served as a springboard for those who wanted to delve deeper into the band's world. "If you're not turned off by [ Mary On A Cross ], and you want to "cancel" the person who wrote it," he said, "then here's the other side of the coin: people hear it and find it deeply offensive and all that, because they didn't have the intelligence to understand what it was about.".
In July 2024, five years after the song's release and nearly two years after it went viral, Ghost finally unveiled the official music video for the song Mary On A Cross . Created to promote the band's epic concert film Rite Here Rite Now , it became a continuation of the video Kiss The Go-Goat 2019, continuing the cursed love story of Papa Nihil and Sister Emperor through cute 60s-style animation.
Of course, by then, the track's legacy was already sealed. As of 2025, the song is approaching 900 million streams on Spotify alone, making it not only Ghost's most popular song, but also one of the most popular songs released by any metal band in the modern era.
Ultimately, the success of the album Mary On A Cross opened up Ghost to millions of unsuspecting people who likely would never have heard them before. "We brought in so many new people who were sucked into it and went down the rabbit hole of everything we created," Forge said in an interview. Metal Hammer . "And that's great, because we always need more people.".