Loudwire.com caught up with OPETH’s Fredrik Akesson whilst the band are on tour in the US and chatted to him about the recent album, Heritage, as well as the music video for The Devil’s Orchard, learning Mikael’s guitar playing style when joining the band and much more. See below for an extract from that interview:

Tell me a little about the new album ‘Heritage’ and how it differs from past albums.

[Frontman] Mikael [Akerfeldt] started writing the album and it started off with a couple of songs, it was more or less a continuation of the last album ‘Watershed’ and we deleted those two tracks and we just wanted to do something different. We don’t want to repeat ourselves. It’s like in movies, the second one is usually crap, so we wanted to take a different sound approach, we wanted to do a really honest and free sound. There’s no sound replacements on the albums, it’s the real deal, no cheating.

Describe ‘The Devil’s Orchard’ musically and lyrically.

Musically, I love it, we usually open up the shows with that song and it sparks fire. It’s a very ’70s psychedelic, improv-ish song, the first beat reminds me of Rush, that kind of groove. Lyrically, Mikael likes to hit on some serious questions, and the video came out cool it’s pretty dark.

What inspired the video for ‘The Devil’s Orchard’? What made you guys decide to go with an animated video?

I think it’s the best Opeth video so far; it was Mikael’s idea to have inspiration, in the video, from old horror movies. I’m happy with it, it came out really trippy. It’s more porn than horror, definitely.

You’ve inspired many bands over the years. Are there any current bands out there that inspire you.

Mastodon, I think they’re really great. For this album ‘Heritage’ the title of the album connects with the music itself, it’s about musical heritage, I think we were inspired by old Swedish folktales. The main inspiration for the new record was older stuff but I do like to check out the new bands.

You can read the full interview over on Loudwire.com.

As we mentioned, OPETH are currently on tour in the US and whilst playing a gig at The House of Blues in Orlando, Florida, the band did an impromtu cover of Bon Jovi’s, ‘Wanted Dead Or Alive’. You can see a clip of that cover below:

OPETH will be touring the UK in November and you can find the dates and ticket info over on our tour page.