heritage

Sweden’s elite progressive metal masters Opeth will release Heritage, their third album for Roadrunner, on September 20th. The first video and single will be the song “The Devil’s Orchard”. Heritage follows up 2008’s Watershed and 2005’s Ghost Reveries, each of which garnered the forward-thinking, genre-bending band some of the best reviews of their career.

Opeth frontman and guitarist Mikael Åkerfeldt weighed in on Heritage, saying: “It will be our 10th album/observation. I dig it; we all do. In fact, it feels like I’ve been building up to write for and participate on an album like this since I was 19.”

Åkerfeldt went a little deeper and described the music contained within Heritage, saying: “It’s quite intense at times in some ‘old’ murky way, and quite beautiful and stark at times, if I may say so myself. It’s obvious I’m going to say nice things about it since I wrote basically the whole piece, but I guess it will raise a few eyebrows and it certainly is an acquired taste. I think you’ll need a slightly deeper understanding of our music as a whole to be able to appreciate this record. I’ve realized my influences for this album are so diverse that I can’t really say what it sounds like. If I can compare it to any other band, it would have to be Opeth, but it’s different from the stuff we’ve done before. I’ve listened a lot to Alice Cooper for the last year, yet I can’t say it sounds like ‘No More Mr. Nice Guy’. I hope you’ll like it once you hear it.”

The album was produced by Åkerfeldt and mixed along with Porcupine Tree frontman/guitarist Steven Wilson, who is also a labelmate of Opeth. Longtime collaborator Travis Smith also worked with Åkerfeldt to create, design and execute the album’s artwork (see image).

The tracklist is as follows
01. Heritage
02. The Devil’s Orchard
03. I Feel The Dark
04. Slither
05. Nepenthe
06. Haxprocess
07. Famine
08. The Lines In My Hand
09. Folklore
10. Marrow Of The Earth