The wait is finally over and Opeth‘s highly anticipated 14th studio album, “The Last Will & Testament,” is now available worldwide today, November 22, via Moderbolaget / Reigning Phoenix Music.
To celebrate this release, the Swedish prog legends are now sharing a visualizer for the song “§4,” which can be streamed below.
Opeth frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt comments on the track” “‘§4’ is an oddball song, just written by instinct. I’m not a clever guy when it comes to writing music. People call us ‘thinking man’s metal,’ I think that’s laughable. I listen to music from so many different genres, it’s impossible for me to stick to one genre. I find the idea boring to try and belong somewhere, we’re a bit all over the place, and I think this song shows our diversity. For ‘§4’ I was inspired by something called ‘twelve note music,’ which I think is a classical term, where you’re supposed to play twelve notes and you cannot repeat a note twice. I heard some of that music by classical pianists playing, and it sounds wicked, it sounds evil, it sounds really strange – so that inspired the initial guitar theme. There’s a melodrama theme in the beginning, it just sounds odd, like it doesn’t fit in, almost like a free-form jazz solo or something like that. But it quickly kind of lands in an almost traditional metal theme with a common response type death metal vocal that has a stereo double-tracked normal vocal response.“
“I can’t remember what happened during the writing process, but I reached a point where I just stopped and felt, ‘ok, time for something strange!’ We ended up with a flute solo by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, which was kind of an accident in a way because I asked him to do a narration, not a flute. As he was doing the spoken word bits, he asked me ‘Do you need a flute solo?’ I was like, ‘Yes, please!‘, while I didn’t really have a part for a flute solo! I had to shuffle through the songs quickly in my head before he would change his mind. I had him on the hook, of course, I was gonna find a piece! So, he played almost like a common response type flute solo in ‘§4.’
“This is a great song with the ending piece being one of the more evil pieces of music I’ve written in a long time: it sounds menacing, sick almost!“
“The Last Will & Testament” is gripping from start to finish, jaw-dropping inside and out, representing some of Opeth‘s finest material to date. Just as Opeth welcomed many into its distressed arms over the years, the Swedes again deliver on the promise that great music always tells a compelling story—this time with growls.
Order for “The Last Will & Testament” HERE.
Moreover, Opeth has landed the cover story for Decibel Magazine’s current December 2024 issue. The in-depth interview with the band was conducted by journalist Chris Dick while the photos were shot by Ester Segarra. The issue can be found HERE.
