Opeth

Opeth, the Stockholm band formed in 1990, made their 2002 album Deliverance sound like a thunderstorm rolling over a pine forest: death growls and crushing riffs one minute, acoustic guitars and eerie calm the next. The title track is the whole Opeth argument in one sprawling piece, a long, winding epic that lurches between savagery and something close to grace without ever losing the thread.

The man holding that thread is Mikael Åkerfeldt, singer, guitarist and chief songwriter, who has steered the ship since founding frontman David Isberg left in 1992. Every original member has since been replaced, and the Deliverance years had Peter Lindgren alongside him on guitar and Martin Lopez on drums. Their songs run long and borrow freely from folk, blues, classical music and jazz, with Mellotrons and wild shifts in dynamics, while the early records lean hardest on death metal.

For their first four albums, starting with Orchid in 1995, they barely played live. That changed with Blackwater Park in 2001 and the first world tour that followed. Ghost Reveries went Top Ten in Sweden in 2005, Watershed topped the Finnish albums chart in 2008, and The Last Will and Testament picked up a Swedish Grammis for hard rock and metal in 2024.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.