Ghost have passed one billion Spotify streams with Mary On A Cross, and have marked it with a retrospective video.
The number is worth sitting with, because of what the song is. It came out in 2019 on Seven Inches Of Satanic Panic, a short record of originals written in a deliberately retro style, the kind of release a band puts out between albums and expects nobody to treat as a single. It became the most played thing in their catalogue three years later, after it was picked up on social video and ran away from them.
A billion plays is the sort of figure usually attached to pop. For a band whose whole presentation is anonymity, robes and a fictional papacy, it is the clearest evidence yet that the costume was never the obstacle anyone assumed.
Tobias Forge started this in 2006 with a song called Stand by Him and the idea that what he had written did not match what he and his bandmates looked like. Twenty years on, the mask is the most recognisable thing in metal and the song that travelled furthest is one nobody planned.