In 2006, an obscure Swedish death metal band named Repugnant dropped their one and only album, Epitome Of Darkness.
They’d been kicking around the Scandinavian underground since 1998, led by pseudonymous singer and guitarist Mary Goore. A handful of demos, seven-inchers and EPs had made their way out of the murk, though what little buzz they’d created was confined to specialist websites and underground connoisseurs.
But now came Epitome Of Darkness, their shot at the death metal big time. It was a decent record – harsh but almost tuneful, almost like the person who was writing the songs listened to more than just brutal noise caked in grave-dirt and acne cream. Except that the band who made it had already split up, having barely made a ripple in DM circles, let alone outside of them.
That may have been deflating, but it wasn’t the end of the world. By the time Repugnant’s lone album finally crawled out into the gloom, Mary Goore had already started a brand new, occult-themed one-man project. This new outfit dispensed with death metal, favouring a sweeter yet eerier sound that owed more to Mercyful Fate and Blue Öyster Cult than Morbid Angel or Death. The name of this new band was Ghost. And the man behind it, the man who once called himself Mary Goore? Tobias Forge.
“It broke my heart,” Tobias told Metal Hammer in 2023 of Repugnant’s failure to make an impact. “I wanted us to be signed to Roadrunner and support Slayer. That never happened, unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately, as it kept me grounded for a few more years and if those things had happened maybe I wouldn’t be here today.”
I wanted us to be signed to Roadrunner and support Slayer
Tobias Forge
Repugnant weren’t Tobias Forge’s first band. He’d started out in school-age black metallers Absurdum in his hometown of Linköping in the mid-90s, before briefly joining another band, Malign. They weren’t his only band even when he was fronting Repugnant,– he pulled double duty in glam rock revivalists Crashdïet between 2000 and 2002 and alt-rockers Subvision from 2002 onwards.
But none of those seemed as close to his blackened heart as his pet death metal band. Tobias had begun listening to rock before he even reached double digits, introduced to it via his older brother Sebastian. He gravitated towards increasingly extreme sounds as he got older: Slayer, Morbid Angel, Death, Possessed.
Repugnant was where that love truly came out. Tobias adopted the nom-de-death Mary Goore, a play on ex-Thin Lizzy guitar hero Gary Moore. Early drummer Chris Piss and bassist Roy Morbidson came and went, before the line-up settled on Tobias, guitarist Sid E Burns (aka Johan Wallin), drummer Tom Bones (born Thomas Daun) and bassist Carlos Sathanas (Gustaf Lindström to his mum and dad).
If the names were jokey, the intention behind it all was anything but. “I really wanted to become a big band,” Tobias told Loudwire.
The rough-as-sandpaper debut seven-inch, 1999’s Hecatomb, plugged into the lineage of Swedish death metal bands stretching back to Grave, Carnage and Nihilist (later Entombed). A split single with Dutch bruisers Pentacle followed in 2002, followed by another split, Live in Stockholm 21.03.2003, in 2003, and the four-track Premature Burial in 2004.
In the era of nu metal, Repugnant were a tough sell. A few labels sniffed around them; they signed a deal early on with Dutch label Hammerheart, who promptly stuck them out on tour in Sweden with US death metal malcontents Macabre. But differences of opinion meant the band and the label parted ways, and there wasn’t much other interest coming their way.
“I learned the hard way in the late ’90s that wanting to play 80s-inspired death metal with my band was painfully out of touch with what was going on at the time,” Tobias told Metal Hammer.
The mood was negative…it all went to hell
Tobias Forge
That didn’t stop them recording the album that would become Epitome Of Darkness in 2004. But the band fell apart that same year, holed beneath the waterline by disinterest and frustration.
“Everything was just shit,” Tobias told Sweden Rock magazine in 2010. “There were only setbacks and everything was extremely negative. The mood was negative. We received no response. It was one of the big reasons why it all went to hell.”
Years later, Tobias would look back on the situation with a more realistic viewpoint. “I don’t know if we were good enough or whatever,” he told Loudwire. “Now, knowing a lot of the things that is required, how many stars that need to align and all the decisions you have to make, I can definitely look back on myself as a 21-year-old and quickly see why I didn’t achieve that with Repugnant. I wasn’t mature. I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t there yet.”
Epitome Of Darkness would finally be released in 2006 by Dutch label Soulseller. There were no reviews, no interviews, no advertising. A man who would become one of the most famous musicians of the following decade had released an album without anyone noticing.
Tobias spent the second half of the 2000s focusing on Subvision and, later, Ghost. He got married and had twin children. The window on becoming a successful musician was closing. He was, by his own admission, getting “desperate”.
Repugnant themselves had seemingly been consigned to the grave by 2010. But two things happened to change that. On March 12 that year, Tobias’ brother Sebastian – the person who had introduced him to metal in the first place – died unexpectedly from a heart attack.
Coincidentally, Tobias had uploaded the first Ghost songs he had recorded to MySpace the same night, catching the ear of Rise Above Records boss Lee Dorrian, who would eventually release their debut album, Opus Eponymous. Equally coincidentally, he’d been planning to resurrect Repugnant, albeit with a new line-up. They’d scheduled their first rehearsal for March 13, but Tobias was at Linköping hospital that night, dealing with the aftermath of his brother’s death.
“[Sebastian’s death] happened the night before our first rehearsal, which is quite eerie,” Tobias said in 2010. “It changed a lot of my views on the whole thing. The first rehearsal was extremely emotionally charged. Well, technically, the second rehearsal,” he added, referring to the fact his bandmates jammed without him at their initial get-together.
Tobias as Papa Emeritus during one of Ghost’s first photo shoots (Image credit: Mick Hutson/Redferns)
The resurrected Repugnance gave Tobias the catharsis he needed. “For me, it felt like a calling to do this again,” he said in 2010. “There’s only one way I can do aggressive music and that is through death metal, and that, in turn, I can only do through Repugnant. The band had to be resurrected so I could get out what I have within me.”
This latest version gigged sporadically over the next year or so, including at least one show with fellow Swedes Watain and an appearance at the 2011 Maryland Deathfest, where both Repugnant and Ghost performed on the same stage on the same day. Tobias even announced that he was writing a new album, to be titled Toxic Contagion.
Except that never happened. Papa Emeritus-shaped commitments forced Tobias to lay his death metal band to rest once more, along with the mooted album. And that’s where they’ve laid ever since, never to rise again.
Or will they? While Tobias has made it clear that he’d never cross the beams and write a death metal song for Ghost – “It would just feel strange, I feel, in that setting,” he told Loudwire – it wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility for this death metal lifer to reanimate Repugnant one more time.
“I still get the same kick out of things that I liked as an 11 or 12-year-old, when I really started listening to that and when death metal was this really dangerous animal that you can just go to this one store to find” he said. “And I’m still sort of chasing that.”
(Image credit: Future)