GRAMMY® Award-winning Swedish theatrical rock band Ghost will headline 19 venues in the U.S. and Canada as part of their IMPERATOUR tour. The "euphoric show" (Rolling Stone) will take place at the Videotron Centre on September 15th, with special guest American sludge metal band Mastodon.
The newly announced dates will be Ghost's first North American tour since the March 11, 2022 release of their fifth album IMPERA via Loma Vista Recordings. As reported by the Los Angeles Times in a Calendar cover story, Ghost has "conquered metal and the charts" as IMPERA debuted at No. 1 on the U.S. album charts, entering the Billboard 200 at No. 2 with first-week sales of nearly 70,000 copies. Internationally, IMPERA debuted at #1 in Sweden, the band's native country, as well as in Germany and Finland, while entering the top 5 in the UK (#2), Netherlands (#2), Belgium (#2), Canada (#3), Australia (#3), France (#5), Ireland (#5), etc.
Produced by Klas Åhlund and mixed by Andy Wallace, the album includes "Spillways," called a "well-constructed rock song" by the New York Times, "Call Me Little Sunshine," which reached #1 on the Billboard Rock Chart (BDS), "and Active Rock's #1 radio single "Hunter's Moon"" - IMPERA sees Ghost transported centuries forward from the Black Death era of its previous album, Prequelle, shortlisted for Best Rock Album at the 2018 GRAMMYs® - or as ROLLING STONE put it: "Ghost predicted the pandemic and, now, the metal band is predicting the fall of empires. "
IMPERATOUR's North American tour announcement completes a perfect storm of Ghost mania, coinciding with this week's ascension of "Call Me Little Sunshine" to the top of the Rock Radio chart and the unveiling of Chapter 11: Family Dinner, the newest installment in Ghost's long-running narrative webisode series. In this new chapter, we find Papa Emeritus IV back at the ministry, joining Sister Imperator, Mr. Saltarian and the spirit of Papa Nihil for a Chinese takeout meal. To take your seat at the reunion dinner, go HERE.
Opening for all dates - with the exception of Green Bay, where Carcass will be opening, and Blue Ridge Rock Fest - will be GRAMMY® Award-winning band Mastodon, who have quietly transformed themselves into one of the most influential, inimitable and iconic rock bands of the modern era. Since their inception in 2000, the Atlanta quartet has defied sonic and thematic boundaries with an uncategorizable, undeniable and uncompromising vision unlike anything else in music. This vision has manifested itself in such canonical albums as Leviathan, which landed on Rolling Stone's coveted list of the 100 greatest metal albums of all time. After Crack The Skye was named one of the best albums of 2009 by Time, the band scored three consecutive Top 10 hits on the Billboard Top 200 with The Hunter [2011], Once More " Round the Sun [2014] and Emperor of Sand [2017]. Out of six career nominations, they received a GRAMMY® Award in the "Best Metal Performance" category for "Sultan's Curse". They have the rare creative force whose music can be felt everywhere from Game of Thrones, Adult Swim, The History Channel and DC comics to Coachella and Bonnaroo. Most notably, they supported the Hirschberg Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research by performing "Stairway To Heaven" in honor of their late manager Nick John. The band reached another critical peak with their ninth full-length album, Hushed and Grim. With the GRAMMY® Award-nominated song "Pushing The Tides," the band reached number one on the Billboard Hard Rock Albums Chart for the third consecutive time. It closed out 2021 on more than a dozen year-end lists, with Rolling Stone raving, "We've got everything from the band's catchiest rockers to date to some of their most impressive epics." The band, which evolves as it opens up new horizons in rock, is still the same unpredictable Mastodon.
