Picture the scene: it’s about ten minutes before Hola Ghost are due to go onstage at Psychobilly Freakout Festival in South London. The green room is packed with musicians in skeleton facepaint and mariachi outfits, and there’s a tangible sense of anticipation in the air. While bassist Jeppe Jessen is keen for them to get onstage on time, everyone else is relaxed. Kristian Sandorff has his feet up in the corner, while his brother Peter reassures us that we can take all the time we want to ask him about his music. Fortunately, Hola Ghost are a band that don’t really need to introduce themselves with basic interview questions, because if you’ve heard of the cult dark Mariachi ‘Death Surf’ band that sprung from two former Nekromantix, you’re probably already a fan. Tonight’s set will end up as the highlight of the weekend for most of the crowd, and we’re only a few months away from another spectacular album, ‘Undead’.

“There’s two country songs on it,” says Peter. “We usually only have the one country song on each release, but [the last two] have been small releases, so now we have two country songs in there.” That’ll be in addition to the two songs we’ve already heard, including the single ‘The End Of The Road’. Does that imply Hola Ghost are reaching their finale? “It’s actually inspired by a Cheech and Chong movie”, laughs Peter,  “where they’re walking in the desert and they go like, ‘hey man, I wonder what is at the end of the road?’ ‘Dude, at the end of the road is the end of the road!’ I was like, that is extremely stupid and philosophical at the same time, that’s fitting. When the song came along, I said it should be in there.”

The B-Side, ‘Iron Reich’, has a completely different mood, as Peter explains. “Yeah, that’s the lockdown song. I was in the airport just a few weeks after lockdown and I was the only one in the airport. Basically, everything was shut down and I didn’t meet any people on the way there or anything, so it was just like a very lonely and strange feeling. It was like being in one of those movies from the eighties, those catastrophe movies we used to watch… nuclear wasteland, comic books, ‘Fallout’ or something. Everybody was for and against this,” he means the lockdown measures during the pandemic, “and shaming people: don’t do this, you’re wrong, and to do that you’re wrong, and everybody was just wrong. I had a feeling that somewhere in this story, someone was sitting and having a great old laugh at how fucking ridiculous we looked, all of us like walking around like ants that someone poked with a stick, so that’s what that song is about.”

Rumours online suggested that ‘Rattlesnake’, Peter Sandorff’s collaboration with De La Rocka from the Finn’s ‘Nightmare Reborn’ album, will be returning on the new Hola Ghost album, and the answer is…mostly.  “We have a different version of that because… the thing is that I wrote the lyrics. Usually I do music first and then the lyrics, but I wrote the lyrics before music for this one. When I did the song with Panu De La Rocka, he asked me ,’do you have anything lying around?’ ‘Yeah, that’s my lyrics, make something out of it.’

I made the song and my son hated it. I said I was gonna record a demo for it and he said ‘go to the basement to record, I can’t stand hearing it anymore!’ So I went to the basement and recorded, and it’s like ‘we could hear you through the floor when you went to the basement recorder!’ Shit! Okay, I better try something else for this song. We kinda had something  – also from lockdown  – from the rehearsal room with more of a ‘Paint It Black’ Rolling Stones vibe to it, so we worked with that. We got in the hand of a famous Danish producer and he added a lot of reverb and stuff, so now it’s even more different than we were thought. We thought we’ll be going in go a different direction. There’ll be a little bit of what we’ve done before, but there’ll also be some…trying out other things because we’re exploring our music.”

How did Peter’s time in Nekromantix influence his role as the lead Ghost? “The audience stuck with me. That’s the biggest influence, basically: having an audience that actually received us well when we came out with this rather different concept and which is also not at all a psychobilly concept, but we worked our way back into the psycho scene, so to say. We’ve been received so well and it’s a great opportunity to  play music and get out and actually grow a little bit of a following, then, at the same time, also see all the lovely people who’ve been hanging out for the last forty years. It’s kind of a win-win! 

See, it was actually when we were touring with Nekromantix on the West Coast [that Hola Ghost began]. All the support bands were playing psychobilly in the way that we knew so well,  but they played it with this different Mexican tone and I was just like, ‘this is cool, this is something else’. I mean, having something you know really well culture-wise, but reflected in a different culture. And also, the people that we were hanging out with on the West Coast were basically all of Mexican descent and they were the nicest people. So, a lot of things attracted to that culture. Then, we went to the local Mexican market in Los Angeles and tried on the jackets and I tried on the hat and we’re like, ‘that’s cool, we’ll buy that!’ We tried it on before the show and the guys that came to pick us up were Mexicans and we were like, ‘shit, can we wear this?’ We asked, ‘is it cool to wear this or you feel intimidated?’ But… ‘no no, it’s also looks awesome, do it, do it, do it!’ So we had Mexican approval, or at least Southern Californian Hispanic approval, of it.”

Of Hola Ghost’s covers, it’s their take on Rancid’s ‘Django’ that’s slotted into their sound perfectly. “They used to be my boss!” shouts Kristian from his corner, looking up from his phone. “We were signed on Hellcat Records, with Nekromantix and Rancid,” explains Peter, “We were touring a bit with Rancid  on the West Coast, and we toured with Lars Frederiksen in Japan, so we are both fans and know them and know the music.  So, we asked to do a song on the tribute album, [and we chose] that one. And then we did what we always do: we fuck around with things and do it differently because otherwise… I mean, if you just play another band’s song like the other band plays it, then just let the other band play it. But, if you have something funny to add… we wrote a a little C part and added a verse and changed the tempo and everything: all things you’re actually not allowed to do. We needed to take it somewhere else, to make it fun for us. Don’t just stand there and pretend to be Rancid.”

From upstairs in the main room, we can hear Wanton finishing their set and the crowd going wild. It’s time for Hola Ghost to do their thing. “Always be open to other cultures,” says Peter, putting on his hat and getting ready to run outside, “because you never know what you’ll get back. You almost, as we did, always get something back that you wouldn’t expect, and you can almost always use it for something positive like we did with Mexican culture. I didn’t see it coming when we started playing America that I will end up looking like this, playing this kind of music with these people. But somehow, all of a sudden, we ended up here.”

Wherever they end up, whether it’s South London, Mexico or Denmark, and whether they’re alive or ‘Undead’, the world needs a little bit more Hola Ghost.

Kate Allvey

Hola Ghost’s new album, ‘Undead’, will be released on 1st January 2027 on Svart Records. Pre-order your copy here

Buy your Hola Ghost merch and records here