For Fredrik Åkesson, guitarist of Opeth, new album The Last Will and Testament both completes a circle and takes the band another step forward. Its sonic palette brings Åkesson back to the start of his journey with Opeth, when he joined for 2008’s Watershed. It’s as if he has returned to the beginning and knows the place for the first time.
Watershed was a high-contrast album of different elements: monstrous heaviness (“Heir Apparent”), colossal balladry (“Burden”), and even the hardest of hard funk (“The Lotus Eater”). Watershed was also the last album to feature frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt’s death-metal gutturals, before he dropped them completely on 2011’s Heritage and Opeth's subsequent three records. The biggest news story of The Last Will and Testament’s release is that the growls, and harder death metal sound which Opeth sprang from, are back.
“This is full circle,” says Åkesson. “Watershed had all kinds of proggy stuff coming in that hadn't been there before. I think it's connected with [previous album] Ghost Reveries in a way, but it also offered something new that led into Heritage, and this new one also has those kinds of elements.”
Åkerfeldt has described The Last Will and Testament as a “restless” album. Perhaps it was an inevitable reaction to the songwriting peak Opeth hit with 2019’s In Cauda Venenum, the apex of the journey into new territory that began with Heritage. With a more overt classic rock sound, Åkesson says the goal of In Cauda Venenum was to be “as epic as possible”.
The Last Will and Testament needed to be darker, stranger, and in its own way, more. The album is bursting at the seams with melodic invention, rhythmic intricacy and histrionic vocal performances, including contributions from Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson and Europe’s Joey Tempest. It is, in short, a riot: an “explosion of ideas” that Åkerfeldt has compared to the hyper mish-mash of TikTok.
The album also plunges Opeth back into the gothic territory of its classic period that began with My Arms, Your Hearse. A concept album set in the 1920s, The Last Will and Testament revolves around the reading of a will left by a deceased patriarch, and the melodramatic revelations that come out of it. It has the most overt storyline in Opeth’s discography since 1999’s Still Life, which told of a religious outcast returning to his home town – with disastrous consequences. Longtime collaborator Travis Smith’s artwork for The Last Will and Testament makes a visual connection with the jet-black austerity of the heaviest album in Opeth’s catalog, 2002’s Deliverance.
“It really incorporates the old Opeth in a way,” says Åkesson of the new album. “And the proggy side that has been with Opeth since the first album, really, but in different ways. But I also think the new one is a step forward. It's different from the old. I mean, the growls are back, and that's a big thing. A lot of old-school fans are happy about that, myself included. But I think this one has more ingredients.”
There’s excoriating death metal, jazzier flourishes, what Åkesson evocatively describes as the “beautiful, forest-y, calm, ambient stuff”, and the downright theatrical – giving Åkesson space to take flight on lead guitar. Åkesson credits new(ish) drummer Waltteri Väyrynen as being a “death-metal head” who has helped push the band back into that direction. He says the drum arrangements and beats are the most complex ever undertaken by Opeth (“I think Mikael wanted to challenge him, and everyone else for that matter”). No small statement from the band that has long deployed knotty, demanding rhythms – one famous example being the outro to “Harlequin Forest” from Ghost Reveries.
“It has more ingredients, but it's more compressed,” Åkesson continues. “A lot of sections aren't dwelt upon that long, in comparison to older tracks – a bit like modern society – but it's still packed with info. I think it's more action-packed: the most action-packed Opeth album ever!”
If you ever wondered what Opeth’s take on attention-deficit disorder might sound like, this is it.
Opeth have recently returned from a US tour where they incorporated new songs “§1” and “§3” (“Paragraph 1” and “Paragraph 3” of the will from the story) into the set. Åkesson describes the setlist as “V-shaped”, starting off with four heavier songs (opening with “§1”), dipping into ballads like “In My Time of Need” and Still Life’s semi-ballad “Face of Melinda”, before becoming “more exaggerated” again, and concluding with the infernal “Deliverance”.
“I really like to play these [new] songs live, because I always think we come off heavier live than on the albums, actually. It's more raw live, and we have to, of course, scale back some of all these layers,” he adds.
The Last Will and Testament also features real string arrangements. The other layering is in the vocals. As well as the growls and guests, Åkerfeldt’s clean singing is ambitious. Åkesson compares it to the operatic extremes of flamboyant English singer-songwriter Arthur Brown. I mention how Åkerfeldt’s delivery of the line “Over time you will heal” in “§5” strongly reminded me of the drama of late-period Scott Walker. Åkerfeldt became obsessed with Walker’s deeply disquieting avant-garde album The Drift around the time he wrote Watershed. He also got Åkesson listening to Walker.
Åkesson uses adjectives like “cinematic” and “theatrical” to describe The Last Will and Testament. With all the different vocalizations of the album’s protagonists, and the twists and turns of the storyline, it sometimes comes close to resembling (and I say this cautiously) a musical.
Where in this chaotic mix does this leave Åkesson laying down his guitar solos – such an intrinsic part of Opeth’s sound? Before he joined, longtime guitar player Peter Lindgren and Åkerfeldt felt like two sides of the same coin. On masterpiece Blackwater Park, and Deliverance, they gave themselves ridiculously tight deadlines to write and record all the solos on an album – often just a day. Åkesson brought a different flavor to the band – tight, technical guitar work in keeping with the Swedish pyrotechnics of an extrovert guitarist like Yngwie Malmsteen. But Åkesson really digs in with his pick and feels the music – making him a passionate (not merely flashy) player.
For In Cauda Venenum, the two guitarists improvised and demoed the solos together, but this time Åkesson enjoyed the freedom of writing and recording in his “little boy’s room”, his home studio.
“I really spent a lot of time with them, trying to come up with something, not just improvising,” he says of playing a solo on every song this time out. “I think about some melody lines, and the goal is to make something that fits the song, of course, and hopefully lifts the song.”
Åkesson’s long solo on the album’s closing ballad, “A Story Never Told”, had to provide the album’s emotional and narratorial resolution. He leaned into the drawn-out legato style of David Gimour-meets-Ritchie Blackmore to “think more vocally”, tie melodies together with the odd run here and there, and do the song’s widescreen quality justice.
Each solo on the album demanded something different from him. The frenetic tapping on “§1” mimicked a spider making its way up the fretboard – a direct response to the song’s lyric, “Like spiders weave”. As Åkesson puts it, his solos on the album “all have different energies”.
“It's always interesting to come up with solos behind Mikael’s parts that he writes, because that also gives you an extra push doing the solos,” he says. “It's easier to come up with more. Perhaps that's just me wishing for [me to play] more original stuff, because the way he writes riffs is very unique as well. So it's always a bit of a challenge to come up with something cool.”
Then there’s Åkerfeldt’s feedback. He’d come back to Åkesson asking him to enter a solo differently, or come out of it another way. Or in the case of “§4”, tell him there was “way too much fast stuff”. But the biggest injunction Åkerfeldt laid down was for Åkesson to be himself – to really go for it. Sometimes it wasn’t as simple as that.
“The most challenging one to do was ‘§5’ actually, because it has a lot of different key changes in it,” says Åkesson. “And the part I'm playing over is kind of weird to play a solo, you can't just go for it. You have to really land on certain notes for it to work. And I was experimenting with different modes. I wanted to have a sadder mode and also mix in a happier mode, and also something in between. It sounds a little bit like an Indian scale, with certain licks that I’ve never done – these fast slides, which are kind of inspired by a sitar player. Trying to get that kind of vibe in. I haven't done that before. So I'm quite happy with that one. It's definitely one of the more odd solos I've ever done.”
Perhaps the most striking thing about Opeth closing the circle with their death metal past is that this once progressive death metal band is now firmly a progressive band with a strong death metal seam. The reintroduction of the growls is unexpected, and even for me, who had been shocked by Heritage like so many others, weirdly disappointing. It felt like In Cauda Venenum was a melodic masterpiece where Åkerfeldt had finally freed himself of the expectations of the past.
To hear him resume growling on return single “§1” repeated that same sense of shock, this time in reverse. But that’s what made it timely. Art is not meant to make you comfortable or meet your expectations as a fan. Heritage, as Åkesson notes, is one of Opeth’s darkest albums, despite the lack of growling. The Last Will and Testament, notwithstanding its morbid premise, is perhaps Opeth’s most exuberant record to date.
“I mean, it's always been there, the [death metal] element, and over all these years we’ve always played the old stuff live,” says Åkesson. “So for us, in a way, it's not a big difference. For me, it's just a big part of the Opeth sound. I look at it like yin and yang. You have the one energy that feeds on the other: the calm parts feed off the aggressive parts, and vice versa. I think that's one of the strengths with Opeth. It probably doesn't tire the listener as much if it would have been only heavy all the time or only soft all the time.”
Opeth’s place within the metal pantheon is assured. Where genius leads, it’s only fair that we should follow. But I wonder whether the band has been accepted as one of the pivotal artists in Sweden’s own songwriting lineage.
There is a connecting line from the jagged rhythms of NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye”, written by members of Swedish pop songwriters Cheiron Productions (founded by producer Denniz PoP), and the angular approach of Opeth and compatriots Meshuggah. Åkerfeldt drew inspiration for In Cauda Venenum from Lasse Färnlöf’s soundtrack to the 1969 surrealistic Swedish thriller Kameleonterna (The Chameleon). The album was primarily written and sung in Swedish, before the vocals were reworked for an English version.
“As for how we're interpreted in Sweden, I don't know,” says Åkesson. “I mean, a lot of people know who we are here, but I think the interest for us is bigger abroad. To a certain extent, maybe Sweden is a bit square when it comes to music – its radio stations and all that. The industry is, in a way, a bit narrow-minded. I'm not saying everybody's like that, and maybe that's good for the metal and hard rock community. It's really not supposed to be in the mainstream. Maybe that goes for the entire world, of course, but if you compare it to America or Finland or the UK, the rock tradition somehow feels stronger [over there].”
Instead he points me to another piece of shared Swedish musical heritage: the 1964 Jazz på svenska (Jazz in Swedish) album by pianist Jan Johansson. The album might well be called Swedish in Jazz since it features jazz interpretations of Swedish folk songs. Johansson’s two sons, Jens and Anders, have played keyboards and drums respectively across an array of hard rock and metal acts: from Yngwie Malmsteen’s Rising Force to Stratovarius to Hammerfall to the mighty Manowar. Jazz på svenska was an album Åkesson listened to with his parents, and the origin point of his understanding of “Swedish folk tones”. These native tones convey the minor melodic sound that resonates with Swedish metal so powerfully, and that Åkesson is reaching for in his solos, too.
Opeth has also been recognised by Swedish musical royalty.
“We actually got a good comment from Björn, from ABBA,” says Åkesson, to my surprise. “Our keyboard player, Joakim: his brother is Björn’s personal trainer. Somehow he has been working with Björn, and he mentioned his brother playing with a band called Opeth, and Björn was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I like that band. They're really good!’”
The Last Will and Testament might pick over the bones of an evil man disinheriting his family, but Opeth is far from the end of the road. It’s fascinating seeing their legacy evolve in front of them. Opeth broke the ground for an overtly progressive approach to extreme music which Colorado's Blood Incantation, for one, have built upon with this year’s outstanding Absolute Elsewhere. The two bands recently went record shopping together in Denver while Opeth was touring through the states. Åkesson is flattered that Opeth is an inspiration, especially to bands that don’t sound exactly like them.
But then again, when has Opeth ever sounded exactly like Opeth? It’s in their mutability that Opeth have proved reliable as one of the best to do it. And with the surprises contained within The Last Will and Testament, who knows where it will lead. The best part is, I don’t think Opeth knows either. The next cycle is yet to begin.
“What's gonna happen next time?” asks Åkesson with a glint in his eye. “We'll have to wait and see.”
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The Last Will & Testament is now available via Reigning Phoenix Music. Order the album - HERE
