Opeth vocalist/guitarist Mikael Åkerfeldt has plans for a new side project, recently telling Faceculture.com:
“I’m thinking of a project, actually—a thing that I want to do with a couple of friends of mine, that I will be writing for. And also, of course, a new Opeth album, hopefully. I have written snippets of music that I haven’t decided where they’re gonna end up yet— or I haven’t decided if they’re gonna end up anywhere yet.”
He further went on to add:
“Well, it will be… I can probably with confidence say that it will happen. But it will be in Swedish. I’ve asked one of my friends, I’ve e-mailed him asking him if he would be interested, because we did a song a long time ago together. Dan Swanö—he’s a producer; he produced the first two Opeth records.
So I asked him if he wants to play drums on this project. And another friend of mine from Stockholm, who is a classically trained piano player, but he plays bass and has a really cool vintage studio too, so I’m thinking of doing something like that. But I’m not sure how it’s gonna end up. I want it to be not so progressive, really, but maybe more ‘folky’ and psychedelic, I think.”
The topic of Opeth moving on from their death metal roots inevitably was asked:
“I was struggling a little bit to find a direction for what was going to become “Heritage“, because I wrote songs thinking along the same lines as I always thought. You know, that we’re a death metal band—the foundation of this band is death metal. So I wrote music similar to what we had done on the “Watershed” record and it wasn’t bad, I just didn’t feel it. I felt that I was done… I still like death metal and it’s not like I don’t appreciate what we’ve done, the previous records. When I was writing for what was going to become “Heritage“, I was writing music just for the sake of writing—I didn’t pay too much attention to why I was doing it, I just wrote stuff cause we were going to do a record.”
When asked what eventually turned him away from death metal’s influence in the band, he mentioned initially writing some death metal styled songs and showing them to bassist Martin Mendez, who told them it didn’t sound right. Åkerfeldt eventually wound up deleting what he had created and went in the more full-fledged prog direction they are now steeped in. He explained:
“I hadn’t been listening to death metal, there was no death metal in my own creativity in music, I left. That’s been gone for a long time. I wasn’t consuming music like that anymore. I wasn’t buying music like that, I wasn’t listening to music like that anymore. Ultimately it didn’t inspire me anymore. And I’d been meaning to go elsewhere, I think, subconsciously for a longer time than what has been shown on the records.”
