How TikTok brought Ghost's track'Mary on a Cross' back to life - Hypebot (2024)

Capitalizing on a TikTok post, the Swedish Metal band Ghost had their first Hot 100 hit with an old psychedelic B-side “Mary on a Cross.”

by Maura Johnston of Chartmetric

Thanks to the way the Billboard Hot 100’s data sourcing has changed in recent years, the music consumption chart has been full of unexpected entrants from years gone by — like the 37-year-old Kate Bush banger “Running Up That Hill,” which was propelled onto the 2022 charts byStranger Things, or the 1977 cut from Fleetwood Mac’sRumours“Dreams,” which returned to Pop’s mainstream because of a chilled-out, cranberry-flavored TikTok clip.

In September, the Swedish Metal band Ghost enjoyed similar success, notching their first Hot 100 hit.“Mary On a Cross,”a deceptively catchy cut from their 2019 EPSeven Inches of Satanic Panic, hit No. 90 on the Sept. 24 edition of that chart — the band’s first time on the all-genre pop tally — thanks to 6M streams and 1K digital sales. The song initially came to prominence because of a fusion betweenStranger Thingsand TikTok — and Ghost smartly capitalized on the trends, leading to the track’s popularity soaring high enough thatthe band’s masked frontman was invited to throw out the first pitch at a White Sox gamein September.

Formed in Linköping, Sweden, in 2006, Ghost plays a style of metal that borrows from many different sub-sects of the genre — their home country’s Black Metal and the sludgy sonics of Metal pioneers Black Sabbath can be heard in their mix, but they also have a Pop appeal that has nudged their music toward the mainstream. Their look helps, too: Frontman Tobias Forge wears elaborate costumes onstage in his various “anti-Pope” guises, and he’s backed by hooded musicians who are known simply as Nameless Ghouls.

Ghost’s striking presence and hooky songs have earned them a global cult followers; three of their albums have made it to the Top 10 of theBillboard200, and they just wrapped up a tour of North American arenas that included stops at New York’s UBS Arena and Montreal’s Place Bell. Before “Mary On A Cross” came out three years ago, the band’s most-streamed songs included the crunchy“Dance Macabre,”a cut from their 2018 albumPrequelle, and the churning“Cirice,”which appeared on 2015’sMeliora. In March of this year they released their fifth album,Impera; its lead single“Hunter’s Moon”had actually premiered the previous fall, when it was used as the closing-credits music for the slasher flickHalloween Kills. It quickly hit the 3M stream mark on Spotify, and is now closing in on 27M streams there.

A Stranger Thing Happened

“Mary On A Cross” was the B-side of Ghost’s 2019 singleSeven Inches of Satanic Panic, which was meant to mimic a 45 that had been excavated “from the 1969 archives.” (It was released digitally in the middle of September 2019 and put out on vinyl two weeks later.) The A-side, the chugging “Kiss the Go-Goat,” was accompanied bya video shot in part at the famed Los Angeles club the Whisky a Go-Go, with the band flanked by go-go dancers. “Mary” is a lighter track than its A-side, incorporating the chiming guitars and swirling organs of that era’s psychedelia into its metal mix.

A little less than three years after the initial release of “Mary,” it crash-landed into the TikTok consciousness thanks to a video aboutStranger Things, the Netflix series that aired its fourth season in the late spring of 2022. This year’s run of the show was a boon for two songs on the fringes of ’80s pop: Bush’s thrummingHounds of Lovecut “Running Up That Hill” went all the way to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 after its inclusion on the show, while a savvy use of Metallica’s 1986 thrash classic “Master of Puppets” sparked interest in those metal pioneers for an entirely new generation.

The rise of “Mary On A Cross” was a bit different, however, spinning out of theStranger Thingsuniverse into the wider TikTok world. It first came to prominence in a fan-made video abouttwo of that show’s characters, Will Byers (portrayed by Noah Schnapp) and Mike Wheeler (played by Finn Wolfhard, who isa musician himself). The clip, which plays off the retro sonics of “Mary” with filters, was initially posted in late July by the “multifandom comfort edits” account@editingtherapy, and it’s been viewed 2.9M times since its initial posting, according to TikTok.

The Immortal World of ‘Mary on a Cross’

A key part of “Mary” going viral is that it musically isn’t tied toStranger Things, which allows the TikTok videos that are hitting big with it to be all over the map, thematically. As of this writing, the top five videos using “Mary” area montage of Angelina Jolie as Maleficentposted on August 24 (45.9M views),a plant being spliced with another plantposted on August 31 (31.2M views), a clip whereRussian president Vladimir Putin is happy about a dogposted on September 2 (16.7M views),a live video of Ghost performing “Mary” in Viennathat was recorded in May but posted on Aug. 13 (10.5M views), and a video about“cuddling” fossilsthat was posted on Aug. 16 (9.9M views). As of Oct. 21, Chartmetric counted 75.4K TikTok videos using “Mary” in its various forms.

As seen above, the track’s Chartmetric score was solid when it initially was released in the fall of 2019, then plateaued for a couple of years before the release of the initialStranger Thingsfan video. The momentum of “Mary” has sustained beyond the band’s blip onto the Hot 100, with interest peaking in mid-September — around Sept. 12, which was right in the middle of the tracking week for the Sept. 24 chart and a day before a scheduled Spotify Live event that unexpectedlycrashed the streaming service.

“Mary” is regaining momentum this month, thanks in part to the track being included on Halloween-themed playlists like Spotify’sHalloween Party, which currently boasts 701.8K followers.

Ghost and their label, Loma Vista, have also responded smartly to the unexpected popularity of “Mary on a Cross.” In August, Ghost releaseda new version of “Mary On A Cross”that is slowed down and swathed in the reverb that makes so many TikTok hits catnip for creators. A few weeks later, both the original and slowed-down versions of “Mary” were included on[MESSAGE FROM THE CLERGY], which also included “Dance Macabre” and other popular songs by the band like“Spillways,”from this year’sImpera, and“Square Hammer,”fromMeloria.Loma Vista also releaseda video of Ghost playing “Mary” liveto commemorate the end of the tour — and to show people curious about the song what Ghost’s compelling live show looks like, drawing them into the band’s singular world.

While TikTok might be known for helping Pop artists, both past and present, blow up on the charts, it’s apparent that the platform is not only genre agnostic but potentially conducive for more niche genres like Metal to reclaim their place in the limelight.

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