More than three decades into their career, Opeth have trained their admirers to expect the unexpected. But even by their own standards, the Swedish progressive titans have conjured something extraordinary this time around. The band’s 14th studio exploration, The Last Will & Testament, is the darkest and heaviest record they have made in decades, it is also the most fearlessly progressive. A concept album recounting the reading of one recently deceased man’s will to an audience of his surviving family members, it brims with haunting melodrama, shocking revelations and some of the wildest and most unpredictable music that songwriter/frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt has ever written. 

“I have become quite interested in family, and the idea that blood is not always thicker than water,” Åkerfeldt explains. “I became interested in how family members can turn on each other. I saw an interview with this guy whose family had all turned against him, over the inheritance, so I wrote a song about that on the last record. The idea stuck with me, and then along came the TV show Succession, and I loved that series. That was in the back of my head too. It felt like an interesting topic that you could twist and turn a little bit.”