When people talk about Opeth, the “progressive” label usually shows up fast. In a new chat with Japan’s Prog Project, Mikael Åkerfeldt got hit with a familiar question: Is it a “challenge” to stay progressive or to keep evolving when he writes for the band?
His answer cuts straight to why he treats genre tags like background noise, rather than a target.
“Yeah, good question. I’m not sure if it’s so important for me to feel that we are progressive, because I don’t really know what it means anymore. Back in the day, I think that it was easier to define a progressive band because they were mixing styles and stuff like that, but now progressive means fast guitar solos, and it’s become a sound and maybe not so progressive, “he explained (via Blabbermouth).
“I think progressive music, especially in rock and metal, has become a bit regressive. And it’s also, I don’t know if I can decide if we are progressive or not. I think it’s up to the audience to decide, but for me, it’s become less and less important to be labeled progressive because I don’t know what it means anymore.”
“But when I write music, it’s easy to, I think, make progress for our own music, because I have so many different kinds of influences and I’m very passionate about my music and stuff like that. So I try, but at the end of the day, I just wanna write emotional music,” Åkerfeldt added.
The follow-up question gets even more direct, asking if he doesn’t “think about trying to be progressive” while writing for Opeth. His reply lands like a mission statement, especially for anyone still stuck on a specific era of the band.
“No. I don’t wanna repeat myself. Many of our fans want us to maybe repeat what we did in the early 2000s, but I’m not really interested in that. I like for us to progress, but not necessarily just so we fit into the progressive rock/metal genre.”
If you’ve been around heavy music long enough, you know how this goes: fans fall in love with a run of records, then treat that sound like a contract. Åkerfeldt treats it like a chapter. He keeps the parts of Opeth that matter: identity, taste, atmosphere, but writes toward wherever his head is now, not where people want him to rewind.
One of the more telling parts of the interview is how casually he admits his listening habits run backward. Opeth pulls from classic death metal, older metal, and prog roots, and Åkerfeldt isn’t shy about the fact that his personal listening stays planted in earlier eras. When asked why newer bands rarely hook him, he lays it out in plain terms:
“I don’t know. Maybe because I don’t really listen. I don’t search for new bands. I don’t know what’s going on in the music scene. I don’t know what’s popular or what’s happening or original or progressive, to be honest. I’m stuck with my old records. And I still have so much music to listen to. So I have no idea what’s happening.”
This isn’t a new take from him, either. Back in 2017, he told Rolling Stone something that still matches what a lot of hard rock and metal lifers complain about: modern metal often sounds too cleaned up.
“I was born in 1974, so I grew up with the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal and the German scene and the U.S. scene of the ’80s and that kind of stuff, so I think today’s metal scene is a bit too sterile for my own taste. I’m not excited about a new metal band or a new metal record because I’ve tried, and most of the time, I just feel it’s just too un-metal-sounding — too polished and too streamlined to fit the genre. It’s just not interesting enough for me, you know?”
Whatever arguments people want to have about what era rules, Opeth’s current run keeps earning respect. The band was honored in the “Best Hard Rock/Metal” category at this year’s Swedish Grammis awards (the Swedish Grammy equivalent), held March 27 at Annexet in Stockholm.
