Ghost’s Collaboration with Def Leppard’s Joe Elliot is Largely Uninteresting
Hours after Ghost announced their collaboration with Def Leppard‘s frontman Joe Elliot on a new version of “Spillways,” the massively popular act uploaded the track to YouTube and various popular streaming services. Normally, that’s about where a post about a Joe Elliot/Tobias Forge vocal collaboration would end, but… can we talk about this track for a minute?
Maybe it’s just me, but Ghost’s latest iteration of “Spillways” featuring Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliot is much to do about nothing. From start to finish, the song sounds almost identical to the studio version, with only some slight variation with how the vocals are done. Rather than doing something cool like making the song sound a bit more like Def Leppard or giving Elliot some more room to really breathe in the mix, Ghost opted to just… re-record their hit song and slap Elliot’s vocals in.
The result is a largely uninspired and almost cynical take on something that could have been really cool. And that’s something of a bummer, given the pomp and circumstance the Swedish powerhouse act gave the announcement yesterday.
Now, Ghost are no strangers to rehashing successful songs in their repertoire *cough*“Mary On A Cross”*cough* but at least in their TikTok fueled popularity you got a different take on the song. We’re nearly a year out since the release of Impera, so this could have and should have been something at least interesting. Especially given Elliot’s level of excitement with the project.
“Impera was my favorite rock album of 2022… I found out along the way that Tobias is a bit of a fan of DL, so I guess it was inevitable we’d both find out about each other! Once we’d been introduced to the idea of working together it just snowballed organically and I’m thrilled that I got to sing on what is my favorite song from that album!”
Maybe I’m looking way too deep into this, but if this was something Ghost expects its fans to get hyped over, then maybe they’ve missed the plot. You can check out the track for yourself below, just don’t expect too much.
