OPETH To Tour North America With KATATONIA Again

May 14, 2012

KSSU Loud Rock director Daniel Cordova recently conducted an interview with guitarist Fredrik Åkesson of Swedish progressive metallers OPETH. You can now stream the chat using the SoundCloud player below.

When asked about OPETH's touring plans for the immediate future, Fredrik said, "Well, we're actually gonna come back to North America again late September. We're doing another headlining run. We're gonna hit the spots we didn't hit on the last tour with KATATONIA [in late 2011]. And we're bringing KATATONIA with us again. . . And then after that we're gonna do a European tour again, and then it's Christmas, I guess. And [then] we're gonna head out to Australia again. So it never ends. I think we've done 130 shows since the end of September."

OPETH has just completed a North America co-headlining tour with MASTODON. The trek kicked off on April 4 in Portland, Maine, and visited more than 30 cities in the U.S. and Canada before wrapping up at Atlanta's Masquerade on May 12.

OPETH's new album, "Heritage", sold 19,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to debut at position No. 19 on The Billboard 200 chart. The band's previous studio CD, 2008's "Watershed", opened with more than 19,000 units to land at No. 23.

"Watershed" was the follow-up to the band's acclaimed "Ghost Reveries" CD, which debuted at No. 64 on the Billboard chart back in September 2005 with first-week sales of just under 15,000.

OPETH's 2003 album, "Damnation", premiered with a little over 5,000 copies.

When asked how OPETH planned to deliver the more technical songs from "Heritage" in the live show, the band's vocalist/guitarist, Mikael Åkerfeldt, said in a 2011 interview, "I thought that might be a problem. But it's not been difficult at all. The live versions of the new songs sound closer to the originals than many of the other songs. We have a new keyboard player who's really into the different sounds we create and he's got lots of kit. When he plays, it's like he has four arms. He's doing a lot to make sure the current live show is something very special. But we'd never record anything that we didn't think we could pull off live."

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