Three years ago, Voltaire’s Ghost was not supposed to exist.
Magnus had a studio date in Nashville, material ready to record, and no band. What followed was, by his own description, a hastily assembled group of musicians with eight to ten weeks to get it together before January. No grand vision. No long-term plan. Just a question: can we get to Nashville and make this record?
They made it. And then something unexpected happened. People listened.
On the occasion of their third anniversary, Voltaire’s Ghost sat down with SONIQLOOX from a cigar lounge at Caesars Palace on the Las Vegas Strip — celebrating, as Magnus put it, “a little bit.” Joined by vocalist Ruby Juhl and drummer Josh Eggstaff, the band reflected on what they have become: a group that has amassed a quarter million streams across their debut album Black Petals Fallen, charted on both Mediabase Top 40 and the Emerging 300 Indie Chart, and quietly built a fanbase that stretches from Brazil to Dublin without running a single ad campaign in either place.
Ruby did not overthink the beginning. “I just wanted to sing,” she said. “I have so much in me I need to get out.” Josh, coming from a different musical background, treated it as a challenge accepted. And Magnus, the architect of it all, found himself realizing somewhere along the way that quitting was never really an option. “Even if I wanted to quit,” he said with a laugh, “we have a studio date coming up. We have material in the can. What would I do? I would say I’m gonna quit, but after this next record. And that would be a year from now.” He paused and with a wink said, “What I’m trying to tell you is I’m trapped.”
What keeps them together is harder to define than a contract or a calendar. Magnus described the band dynamic as something entirely its own: more than friends, not quite family, partly a business partnership, and yet different from all three. “It’s a very unique dynamic,” he said. “It’s always evolving because we’re always evolving.”
That evolution shows up in the music. Songs that were laid back in the studio have become live barnburners — Magnus noted that Death Becomes You has shed nearly thirty seconds off its runtime since they started playing it live, as the band’s energy pushed the tempo further and further. “I was kind of taken aback at how laidback the recorded version feels,” he said. Josh, who developed the drum track for The Ballad of Colleen Grey on the spot in the studio while Ruby was still writing the lyric in the other room, treats that kind of pressure as fuel. “I work best under pressure,” he said. “So I was like, I better come up with something right now.”
The mythology behind The Ballad of Colleen Grey is as layered as the song itself. Magnus found the guitar — a 1959 Gibson Les Paul reissue he would name Colleen — at a Guitar Center that had just opened in his neighborhood. He had picked up another Les Paul first, hated it, and was pointed toward this one. He almost passed on it too. The color was off. There was a flaw in the grain. “And I picked it up and I was like, I have to buy this right now,” he said. “I felt songs in it immediately.” Shortly after, he had a dream that it was haunted by a very particular ghost. He told Ruby. She wrote the lyric. And the song that would become their Halloween release was born from a guitar, a dream, and the specific alchemy of three people who might have always been destined to join forces.
As for what comes next, a careful journalist might have left the cigar lounge with nothing more than “new music is coming.” But Magnus, perhaps carried away by the moment, let slip that Christmas Prayer from their original Nemesis EP will return to all streaming platforms on November 27th, beginning a full re-release campaign for that record. Ruby’s expression made clear this was not in the press release. “That’s off the record,” Magnus said. “I’m sorry.”
Asked what they want a first-time listener to walk away feeling, the band landed somewhere between hungry and fulfilled — Ruby wanting them starving for more, Josh wanting them satisfied, and Magnus hoping most of all that they feel something. “So much music is so disposable,” he said. “It comes in one ear, it goes out the other. I want people to be like, that was interesting. I have to hear that again.”
Three years in. Trapped, by their own admission, and clearly thrilled about it.
Direct to You.
