Ghost are recording a new album and plan to release it in late 2021, frontman Tobias Forge has revealed.

In a new interview with Sweden Rock Magazine, Forge said his group’s plans to record in  January were still in tact and that they plan to release an album late next year.

Forge added that the release would coincide with a new tour and that no album would be released until it is safe to resume touring following the coronavirus pandemic.

He said: “The plan now is for me to be here [in the studio] writing for another two months until Christmas. The idea is for the album to be recorded in January.

The actual recording will last around six weeks and then there’s two to three weeks of mixing and mastering. So sometime in March the record should be finished, but it won’t be released until after the summer.”

He continued: “As it looks now, knock on wood, we will then go on tour…We won’t release an album until we know that we are actually going on tour. The album release will coincide with the start of a tour.

“Of course, we could announce an album release date and then, for some reason, it might not be possible to tour, but that’s a whole other matter.”

In an interview about their last album with NME, Forge described how it might have been “the first positive record ever written about the plague”.

Speaking in 2018, Forge said: “Essentially, it’s a record about survival, start to finish. The record takes you through the idea of mortality, before ending on the question, ‘if you could circumvent death… would you?’ I come from the metal underground, and the subject of The Black Death has been excavated many times.

But those records are about the decimation of everything, and little light is shown to the survivors. There’s an argument that mankind learned a lot of good from what happened…”

Reviewing the group’s performance at Twickenham last year, NME said: “Ghost continue to be the most interesting and exciting thing about the melodic end of the rock scale.”