OPETH Mainman MIKAEL ÅKERFELDT: 'The New Album Never, Ever Gets Boring'

OPETH mainman Mikael Åkerfeldt recently spoke to U.K.'s Terrorizer magazine about the group's upcoming album, "Ghost Reveries", tentatively due on August 30 via Roadrunner Records. A few excerpts from the interview follow:

Terrorizer: Still working on the album?

Mikael: "We still have the cover to do and the booklet and photos and all sorts of things."

Terrorizer: But the album's almost completed?

Mikael: "You could probably say so. We've done the mixes for five heavy, long tracks, but we still have the mixes for three or four extra songs left to do. Everything's recorded. It's just that KATATONIA went into the studio directly after us, so we have to wait like a week or something to do the mixes for those last songs."

Terrorizer: Is there perhaps a certain organic quality which has been worked into the songs because of you having rehearsed for this album?

Mikael: "Yeah. It'd like to hope so, at least. I worked more with each song and each passage, so I feel the songs 100 per cent. They're much more well-structured this time around."

Terrorizer: There was a certain flow that you seemed to lose on some of the songs on "Deliverance". "Damnation" seemed to breathe properly, where "Deliverance" generally didn't.

Mikael: "I have to agree, because I think at the time we were recording I was so stressed that it was going to be an album at all; and since we were doing two albums, I think my heart was in the project of doing 'Damnation', because that was the odd thing. While I'm happy with 'Deliverance' overall, I think 'Damnation' is one of our best albums ever. 'Deliverance' is not our strongest album, but I think the song 'Deliverance' is one of our best songs. So I'm not slagging the album off, it's just the memory of the whole recording is so bad, and I know how I was functioning when I was doing those songs. I was under a lot of pressure and I just wanted it to be done. This time around I paid much more attention to the small details and put much more energy into making the songs like, full-on all the time, if you know what I mean. The new album never, ever gets boring. People should never think that OPETH are boring — and we were kind of treading that line on 'Deliverance', I guess."

Terrorizer: So are the lyrical themes of this new record moving into new and different territory too?

Mikael: "The lyrics are almost a regression, I think. I've gone back to the early influences of the band. I wanted to write like an occult kind of concept story. I didn't want to write a stupid Satanic lyric and it's not a Satanic album or anything, but I started with this idea of a concept, and that was like a red thread, if you know what I mean, throughout the story: that there is some occult undertone in it. The lyrics are almost like a cliché for death metal, but written how I write, so it's not just stupid. It's some good stories, I think. It's much more sinister than before: I haven't written lyrics like this in fifteen years. I hope they're better now than they were fifteen years ago!"