TikTok Propels Ghost’s “Mary On A Cross” to Gold in the U.S.

For the fourth time since they came onto the scene back in 2006, Ghost have achieved their fourth gold-certified single in the U.S. Joining hits like “Cirice” from Meliora, “Dance Macabre” from Prequelle, and “Square Hammer” from Popestar, “Mary On A Cross” from the band’s Seven Inches of Satanic Panic EP has been propelled to the same stature thanks to meme culture and viral TikToks.

In order for a song to be considered Gold-certified according to the RIAA, a song has to have sold either half a million copies or reached the streaming equivalent. Thanks to its sudden popularity over the summer, a popularity that Tobias Forge’s own daughter had to explain to him, the song quickly became the band’s most streamed song on Spotify.

“I think it was my daughter who spotted it first. She said, ‘I heard Mary On A Cross on TikTok. She’s done that before with other songs. Then I was summoned to a label meeting and they were like, ‘Are you aware of what’s going on?’, and they started presenting stats.”

The song became so popular that Ghost re-released it in a more slowed down format, which is what people were doing on TikTok to change the song’s sound altogether. Whether this means the band will suddenly find some more songs from their “1969 archives” featuring the vocal stylings of Papa Nihil remains to be unclear.