Jul 15, 20232 min read

Love Ghost Teams Up With SKOLD For A Hard-Hitting Rock Banger "Payback"

Love Ghost x SKOLD "Payback" - The Cage, a music blog powered by Cage Riot — Photo courtesy of Love Ghost

Love Ghost decided to come out swinging with a new release “Payback” - and the guitarist SKOLD will knock you out!

Love Ghost teams up with SKOLD (Shotgun Messiah, KMFDM, Marilyn Manson and Motionless in White), who also produced the track and gives us a hard-hitting grunge rock banger. There’s a lot more than just grunge in this song - but you get it - this ain’t your mommy’s pop music.

For starters you can’t miss the opening guitar plucks they are already legendary in my mind. They feel like the first shot of whiskey on an all-night drinking binge. You aren’t drunk yet, but you KNOW what’s coming!!! It’s gonna be hard, fun and possibly have some consequences (the ones that suck but you can’t stop bragging about lol)

In the video, we open to a POV of being in a very drab room and void of any personal items, and it’s possible that we are a captive. What immediately is unusual is that there is quite an attractive person motioning us to leave. The room reveals itself to possibly be a fleabag hotel. Motioning us still, we are led to a car, and the eyes we embody don’t seem at all to care about following them. We feel safe is the assumption.

Jumping to Love Ghost's vocal performance and it is awesome so fitting, so perfect, and well-placed within the guitars. It actually feels as if the vocals sit within each string being scraped by SKOLD. Especially In the chorus “ashes ashes we all fall down it’s time to watch you burn down”. Rumbling guitars switch to an echo with a gentle piano-supported rhythm (nice touch!) if you need a visual - remember that middle school teacher who COULD scratch the chalkboard and relished in it? You can’t forget it and it’s unnerving and legendary and you can’t duplicate it - that’s how I feel about this guitar performance.

Back to the visuals, we finally reach our destination and the dark-haired beauty has appeared and disappeared intermittently. Smiling, they lead us to a door. Are they a figment? Are we dreaming? Ok, I thought hard - tell you the next scene?????? - it catches me off guard so I decided on no spoiler review, so visually I’m going to block you. Audibly I can share the world. The guitars explode and SKOLD delivers a fitting anthem to the story. Ok, so here's a taste, it’s violent and it has a twist that now tells us why our main character is so consumed by this beautiful person. Can we trust - anyone? Who is the enemy and who is out to get us? Watch and this thriller will reveal the ending.