17 July 2025
Tobias Forge, frontman of Swedish theatrical rock band Ghost, has offered a fresh perspective on the long-running “rock is dead” debate — and he’s not ready to write rock ‘n’ roll’s obituary just yet.
In a new interview with Consequence, the 44-year-old Call Me Little Sunshine singer acknowledged the pessimism often expressed by older rock icons, most notably KISS legend Gene Simmons, who’s repeatedly declared the genre dead.
“I think it was Gene Simmons that said it most times… I understand that it’s been sparse,” Forge said. “But I do believe that with time, there will be more [headlining rock] bands.”
Forge, whose band achieved a major career milestone with their first Billboard number one album Skeletá in May, believes the doom-and-gloom narrative around rock is largely generational.
“There’s this strange time phenomenon that happened somewhere in the 2000s where everything that was sort of old was old, and everything that came after was new — and just keeps on being labelled as new,” he said. “Especially by people who were in their twenties or thirties or forties at the time, and now are in their forties, fifties, sixties.”
For younger fans, Forge added, Ghost isn’t even a “new” band anymore — despite some in the industry still framing them that way.
“If you ask a lot of our fans who are 15 years old now, just the fact that our band has been around for 15 years — do you think that they think that we are a new band? No. And that’s how it should be. I think they are right in the sense that we’re an old established band.”
While Simmons, now 75, once controversially blamed fans for killing rock by “downloading and file sharing for free”, Forge strikes a more optimistic chord, pointing out that newer bands are rising through the ranks — some faster than Ghost did.
“There are a few examples of fairly new bands who’ve risen to great statures, faster than we did,” he noted.
Despite the ongoing chatter, Ghost’s continued success — and Forge’s confident vision — suggest that rock’s pulse might not just be steady, but ready to thunder onstage for years to come.
