“I don’t know my way around a patchbay, but I can press Record”: Mix engineer recalls the “stressful” task of remixing Ghost’s new album SkeletáGhost’s latest record, Skeletá, made waves across the globe. Not only did it place Tobias Forge and co right at the top of the US Billboard 200 albums chart, but Skeletá also peaked at #1 in their home country of Sweden, as well as Germany and Australia. The record has been a rousing success – though it went through two rounds of mixing before Forge was satisfied.
The original mix was a collaborative effort between Dan Malsch and Andy Wallace in August 2024. A few months later in November, Malsch would be asked to return to the mix with fresh eyes – and at a fresh sound desk. Originally mixed at Malsch’s own Soundmine Recording Studio in Pennsylvania on an SSL 4000 desk, the re-mixing took place in an entirely new studio in Stockholm.

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“I received a call asking whether I could come to Stockholm and touch up all the mixes,” Malsch tells Sound on Sound. “This turned out to be a huge learning curve, because I ended up in a studio that I had never worked in before.”
Plunged into a totally foreign studio with monitoring equipment and a console he had “never used before”, Malsch worried he might be out of his depth. With an inability to do recalls, he admits: “It was a tall order for a mix engineer. Over two and a half weeks I was at the studio, IMRSV, with 16‑hour daily marathon sessions and no breaks.”

There was the added pressure of retouching the work without his collaborative mixer Wallace. “It was a lot of pressure, and very stressful,” he says. “I mean, I didn’t want to be the one messing up a bunch of Ghost mixes! The entire Ghost team wanted the record to be great, and there was no shortchanging anything. They could have gone with the Pennsylvania mixes.”
Of course, that’s not to say the original Skeletá mixes were poor. “They were great mixes,” Malsch insists. “But they still wanted to go that extra mile, trying to get the mixes to another level.”
The theatrical metallers also took a unique approach with songwriting, opting for a more introspective perspective that adopted the pop-tinged songwriting abilities of Max Grahn.
While his roots are firmly in hardcore acts, his career of playing in “30-something bands” has left him with an incredibly diverse palette – perfect for expanding Ghost’s sonic world. “I started going my own path in production, writing pop music, which I’ve always loved,” he explains. “Turns out writing actually good pop is harder than I thought!”

“During writing we didn’t have engineers in the room,” he recalls. “I have kindergarten level knowledge of how stuff works in a live studio. I don’t know my way around a patchbay, but I can press Record. Once in the box, in Pro Tools, I’m at home.”
“We were [writing] mostly in the big live room, where we had drum kits and guitars and stuff hooked up. For us, playing instruments is the cornerstone of every song we write. We both play drums, guitar, bass and synths. It’s very important that things feel fun.”
Together, Grahn and Forge worked out the sweet between “intuitive and unintuitive” sounds. Once that was found, the songwriter explains that the pair would record with a Shure SM7 cardioid dynamic microphone going into a Fairman. A 1176 compressor was used for vocals.
“We’d play electric and acoustic guitars, the former through a Rockman, made by Tom Scholz from Boston,” he adds. “They’re like a portable cassette player that you can clip to your belt and plug into your computer. With headphones you sound like you’re a rock star on a rock stage.”

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