Inside Track: Producing & Mixing Ghost

The members of Ghost are, notoriously, anonymous.

Swedish hard rock band Ghost have topped charts worldwide — with an album that was mixed twice!

“One of the most interesting things of my career happened in November last year,” reports Dan Malsch. “Andy Wallace and I had mixed the entire Ghost album, Skeletá, over three weeks in August 2024 at my Soundmine Recording Studio in Pennsylvania, on my SSL 4000 desk. A few weeks later I received a call asking whether I could come to Stockholm and touch up all the mixes. This turned out to be a huge learning curve, because I ended up in a studio that I had never worked in before, with monitoring and a console I’d never used before, so I could not do recalls.

“It was a tall order for a mix engineer. Over two and a half weeks I was at the studio, IMRSV, with 16‑hour daily marathon sessions and no breaks. It was a lot of pressure, and very stressful. I mean, I didn’t want to be the one messing up a bunch of Ghost mixes! The entire Ghost team wanted the record to be great, and there was no shortchanging anything. They could have gone with the Pennsylvania mixes. They were great mixes. But they still wanted to go that extra mile, trying to get the mixes to another level.”

How far the commitment to excellence of the Ghost team and Malsch’s upgraded mixes helped steer Skeletá to major success is hard to say, but the fact is that Ghost’s sixth studio album is the theatrical Swedish heavy metal band’s most successful to date, in terms of chart positions. It was the band’s first album to top the Billboard 200 in the US, it went to number one in many other countries as well, and it reached number two in the UK.

Dan Malsch at Stockholm’s IMRSV studios, where Skeletá was remixed.

Ghost Story

Naturally, a commitment to excellence starts right at the beginning. In the case of Skeletá this involved band leader Tobias Forge writing two of the album’s 10 songs alone, another two songs with Salem Al Fakir and Vincent Pontare, and the remaining six with Max Grahn. In all cases, these Swedish songwriters also co‑produced the songs they co‑wrote, with the exception of the two tracks written by Forge alone, which were co‑produced by him with Pontare.

Max Grahn co‑wrote and co‑produced six of the tracks on Skeletá.Photo: Nikola StankovicMax Grahn belongs to the colossally successful Swedish pop songwriting scene that started with ABBA and spawned Max Martin. Grahn has co‑written songs for Conan Gray, Kim Petras and Lewis Capaldi, and performed on music by Justin Bieber (drums), the Weeknd (guitar), and more. Grahn is signed to Max Martin’s MXM Music, and works from the publishing company’s studio complexes in Sweden and the US.

“Max [Martin] is a mentor and a colleague, and we have written a few songs together,” explains Grahn. “Before that, I played in 30‑something bands. One of them was a hardcore band, and the singer was Karl Schuster, who left to sign with Max and write pop music under the name Shellback. He quickly had big hits with Pink, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake and so on. But I thought, and still think, that being in a band is the coolest thing you can do. I would record the bands I was in, and gained some merit from being on the computer. But it turned out that being in a band with multiple grown men, creating, rehearsing and aligning your goals and sacrifices is harder than I thought. So I started going my own path in production, writing pop music, which I’ve always loved. Turns out writing actually good pop is harder than I thought.”

House Of Hits

Max Grahn first connected with Tobias Forge in 2021, and the two co‑wrote the lead singles for Ghost’s fifth studio album Impera (2022): ‘Hunter’s Moon’ and ‘Call Me Little Sunshine’. The latter was nominated for a Best Metal Performance Grammy.

“Tobias and I hit it off right away. We went into the studio, sat down with a guitar each, started playing and writing, and found this really good synergy. We fed off each other’s ideas and kept building stuff, and wrote those two songs. At some point in 2024, we decided to go back in the studio again to see what might happen. We kept coming out of the studio with new songs and material. I actually don’t think we’ve written anything that hasn’t been released. We have had no misses yet, only ‘hits’.”

Tobias and Grahn conducted their songwriting sessions for Skeletá at MXM’s studio complex, designed by Jochen Veith, who was interviewed in SOS May 2022. “The whole house is filled with a group of 10 people or so who are signed to MXM, and each of us has their own studio, plus there’s a big live room. Next door to me is Elvira [Anderfjard] who’s crushing it with the new Addison Rae stuff now, and she’s done Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and so on. Next door is Oscar Görres, who’s done Ariane Grande, Troye Silvan and so on. Then it’s LIOHN, Holter, Mattman & Robin and more. I can go out of my door and hear this cutting‑edge pop music from the best people in the world. I’m fantastically spoiled.

“Gear‑wise, I have ATC SCM45A Pro monitors, built into the wall, with a pair of 1x12 custom ATC subs. I have a UA Apollo x8p audio interface, and then the magic part: a Xilica XP 4080 audio system processor, which coordinates the speakers and allows me to tune the room to my liking. And I use Yamaha NS10s with a sub as alt listening. My setup is essentially in the box. My accumulated outboard so far is an Alesis Midiverb II, which I heard Aphex Twin uses, an Alesis 3630 compressor, an Evol Audio Fucifier Bloodmaster Edition Distortion, and I got a Roland GP‑8 guitar effects processor, because Kee Marcello, the guitarist of Europe, used that in the ’80s, and we wanted that kind of guitar tone for this Ghost album. We ended up not using the GP‑8, but I’m still experimenting with it. I also have some synths and cool guitars.”

Conducting Traffic

For the writing sessions he did with Tobias Forge, Grahn says: “We were mostly in the big live room, where we had drum kits and guitars and stuff hooked up. For us, playing instruments is the cornerstone of every song we write. We both play drums, guitar, bass and synths. It’s very important that things feel fun and, weirdly enough, both intuitive and unintuitive to play. Writing should not only be fun, but also be the right amount of challenging.

Max Grahn: I have kindergarten level knowledge of how stuff works in a live studio. I don’t know my way around a patchbay, but I can press Record. Once in the box, in Pro Tools, I’m at home.

“We both grew up in rehearsal spaces, where we learned to write songs. It’s a way of writing that automatically creates an identity, because playing is so physical and personal. During writing we didn’t have engineers in the room. I have kindergarten level knowledge of how stuff works in a live studio. I don’t know my way around a patchbay, but I can press Record. Once in the box, in Pro Tools, I’m at home.

“While writing we used a Shure SM7 going into a Fairman and then an 1176 for vocals. We’d play electric and acoustic guitars, the former through a Rockman, made by Tom Scholz from Boston. They’re like a portable cassette player that you can clip to your belt and plug into your computer. With headphones you sound like you’re a rock star on a rock stage.

“All of the songs that we’ve done are 50/50, him and me. When we hammer out songs and arrangements, we are both like little conductors. We like to have a full overview of the full ‘score’ in our heads. We always come back to the guitars when writing, but we are all over the place with instruments, creating the basic arrangements. Once we had written and mapped out the songs in enough detail, it was time to take them into the big studio for proper tracking, which was Atlantis Studios in Stockholm.”

Pin Sharp

Famously, the members of Ghost are anonymous, calling themselves ‘Nameless Ghouls’. Even Forge’s identity was not revealed until 2017. As a singer on Skeletá, his name is Papa V Perpueta, while he’s credited as songwriter ‘A Ghoul Writer’ and producer Gene Walker. With band proceedings shrouded in secrecy, Grahn has to be discreet in how he describes the tracking process.

“Let’s just say that all music appeared...