Swedish progressive metal legends Opeth are celebrating the arrival of their 14th studio album, The Last Will & Testament, out today (22nd) via Moderbolaget // Reigning Phoenix Music.
To mark the release, the band has shared a visualizer for the track “§4,” featuring a guest appearance by Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson.
Opeth frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt comments:
“‘§4’ is an oddball song, just written by instinct. I’m not a clever guy when it comes to writing music. People call us ‘thinking man’s metal,’ I think that’s laughable. I listen to music from so many different genres, it’s impossible to me to stick to one genre. I find the idea boring to try and belong somewhere, we’re a bit all over the place, and I think this song shows our diversity. For ‘§4’ I was inspired by something called ‘twelve note music,’ which I think is a classical term, where you’re supposed to play twelve notes und you cannot repeat a note twice. I heard some of that music by classical pianists playing, and it sounds wicked, it sounds evil, it sounds really strange – so that inspired the initial guitar theme. There’s a melodrome theme in the beginning, it just sounds odd, like it doesn’t fit in, almost like a free-form jazz solo or something like that. But it quickly kind of lands in an almost traditional metal theme with a common response type death metal vocal that has a stereo double-tracked normal vocal response.
I can’t remember what happened during the writing process, but I reached a point where I just stopped and felt, ‘ok, time for something strange!’ We ended up with a flute solo by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, which was kind of an accident in a way, because I asked him to do a narration, not flute. As he was doing the spoken word bits, he asked me ‘do you need a flute solo?’ I was like, ‘yes, please!‘, while I didn’t really have a part for a flute solo! I had to shuffle through the songs quickly in my head before he would change his mind. I had him on the hook, of course I was gonna find a piece! So, he played almost like a common response type flute solo in ‘§4.’ This is a great song with the ending piece being one of the more evil pieces of music I’ve written in a long time: it sounds really menacing, sick almost!“
Watch the clip below:
Feature Image Photo Credit: Chris Loomis
