Opeth
Opeth is a musician.
Opeth formed in Stockholm in 1990 as a death metal band and have spent three decades arguing with that description. The early records already carried the tell: ten-minute songs that drop out of a blast section into a fingerpicked acoustic passage without a visible seam, folk and blues and jazz chords sitting inside music that is otherwise extremely heavy, and vocals switching between a death growl and a clean voice good enough to carry the quiet stretches alone.
The peak of the hybrid runs from My Arms, Your Hearse through Ghost Reveries, and Blackwater Park is where the two halves finally sound like one idea rather than a negotiation between two bands sharing a rehearsal room.
Then they stopped. From Heritage in 2011 the growls all but vanished for a decade and the group turned into a 1970s progressive rock band with a metal memory: Mellotrons, organ, odd time signatures, clean singing throughout. Opinion divides sharply here and both sides have a case. The later albums are better played and more distinctive than they are exciting, and a listener who came for the heaviness is entitled to feel short-changed. The argument has been running ever since, which is a healthier fate for a band than being ignored.
Music (18)
- Blackwater Park (2001)
- Damnation (2003)
- Ghost Reveries (2005)
- Still Life (1999)
- Watershed (2008)
- Heritage (2011)
- Deliverance (2002)
- Morningrise (1996)
- Orchid (1995)
- My Arms, Your Hearse (1998)
- Pale Communion (2014)
- Sorceress (2016)
- The Last Will and Testament (2024)
- In Cauda Venenum (2019)
- Garden of the Titans: Opeth Live at Red Rocks Amphitheatre (2018)
- In Live Concert at the Royal Albert Hall (2010)
- The Roundhouse Tapes (2007)
- Lamentations: Live at Shepherd’s Bush Empire 2003 (2003)
Where to start with Opeth
Blackwater Park is the album, and there is a reason everybody names it first: the most focused hour they have recorded, and the strongest argument that the soft and heavy halves belong to the same group.
Go to Still Life next if you want the older, longer, more gothic version of that, and Ghost Reveries if you want the most lavish. My Arms, Your Hearse is for listeners who came for the death metal and want the harshest good record on the shelf.
Damnation is the acoustic one, an hour of Mellotron and clean singing with no growling at all, and the album to give a friend who says they do not like metal. Its companion piece Deliverance is the opposite experiment and much heavier.
For the later band, Pale Communion is the most successful of the progressive rock albums, and The Last Will and Testament is the recent one where the old harshness comes back into frame.
The death-metal-and-folk masterpieces
The albums where the growls and the acoustic passages sit inside the same song, which sounds like a gimmick and is instead the most convincing case that metal can hold real dynamics. Blackwater Park is the entry point and Still Life the fan favourite.
The acoustic and progressive Opeth
Damnation dropped the growls entirely in 2003 and predicted where the band would end up. From Heritage onward they became a seventies progressive rock act, which split the audience permanently and produced some of their best playing.
Early Opeth and the live records
Orchid and Morningrise are the long, raw, unfocused early albums that devoted listeners defend. The live records are where the two halves of the band make most sense back to back, and Royal Albert Hall is the best documented.