Damnation

The Mellotron occupies a phantasmal space in our pop culture consciousness. One of the earliest examples of sampling technology, its peculiar tone was initially conceived so that anybody could play, say, a flute, by using a tape recording of that flute remapped onto the notes of a keyboard. Only it wouldn’t come out sounding quite like a flute. The distortion of the tape produced a timbre drenched in a kind of eerie nostalgia; its choir bank was described as the sound of “dead men singing.” The keyboard became so popular on the back of songs like “Space Oddity” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” that by the ’70s, it was rare to attend a progressive rock show without seeing one. Its warble seemed the embodiment of dreams, that melted meeting point between memories and fantasy. The tape’s decayed form of analog recall is part and parcel with the instrument. Deploying this iconic sound for their prog-haunted album Damnation, Opeth made one small change: They used MIDIs.

Where exactly does Opeth stand these days, anyway? Once at the vanguard of prog’s evolution into the 21st century, lately the Swedish metal godfathers feel about as antiquated as the ’70s records they bowed down to throughout their golden run. Though they earned international acclaim for their predilection for 10-plus minute songs, fingerpicked acoustic interludes, and frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt’s tendency to swap freely between throaty growls and his melodic, fragile singing voice, you don’t really hear too much about them beyond their dedicated fanbase. Is it just the ever-tenuous proposition of clean vocals in metal? Is it the nature of prog to forever be snarked at, derided even by those who sculpted its sound in the first place?

For as much as prog makes apologists of us all, something about the genre manages to retain its grip on our collective imagination. How else to explain the explosive popularity of the Windmill bands, or Blood Incantation and Tomb Mold’s crossover success, or Angine de Poitrine becoming a water-cooler topic overnight? Do the children secretly yearn for dazzling time signature changes, for theatrical concept albums, for Moog racks? Perhaps it’s just Georg Simmel’s age-old cycle of fashion at play, and prog’s rejection of anything too current is actually exactly what continually thrusts it back into the conversation—a vulgar haven for those exhausted by the ease and digestibility of hipper trends.

The thing is, for a moment in the 2000s, prog was actually somewhat mainstream again. Following alt-rock’s aughties surge, a slew of bands like Mastodon, the Mars Volta, and Coheed & Cambria became main-stage festival acts by adapting modern hard rock conventions into over-the-top mutations. Out of this opulent crop, Opeth were the OSDM purists at the party. While various disparate earlier bands had charted the nasty waters between metal and classic prog—from Queensrÿche’s operatic heavy metal to Cynic’s spacey Florida tech-death—Opeth offered a more delicate and barren take on this fusion without sacrificing the filth. For Åkerfeldt, there were two competing philosophies driving the band’s music. On one hand was the idea that death metal had a unique power and precision among even the heavier styles of the day like industrial, grindcore, and noise music, and that the genre was as important a mode of expression as pop or rock. On the other was the concept that quieter music could be just as intense as the most crushing blastbeats.

Among his fellow metalheads, Åkerfeldt was something of an outcast. “At the time I’d dropped the whole ‘being tough’ idea,” he said of Opeth’s earliest music. “I wasn’t listening to music because I wanted to be cool anymore. I wasn’t afraid. The death metal scene at the time was really closed in—you were supposed to be a certain way otherwise you weren’t, the word they used at the time was ‘true.’ Or you were a poseur. And I was a poseur because I wasn’t pure.”

A Swedish death metal kid who honed his chops while working in an acoustic guitar shop, Åkerfeldt was brought on as Opeth’s bass player and inherited the band after all the original members dropped out. He was drawn to the project simply because he liked how the name looked on paper—gothic, but belied by that breathy, vowelly softness. Soon enough, the band would become a vehicle for Åkerfeldt’s prolific explorations across the metal spectrum, drawing on the baroque strain of melodic death metal emerging in his home country from bands like In Flames and Dark Tranquility, and seasoning it with dashes of Canterbury folk, psychedelic rock, classical guitar, and whatever else he could wrap around a fretboard.

In its first decade, the band released a record almost every year, with each successive album reaching for a new high. On 1996’s Morningrise, they were at turns doomy and sparse; on 1998’s My Arms, Your Hearse, they steamrolled through headbangers with a blackened gallop. By the time they reached their critical and commercial breakthrough, 2001’s Blackwater Park, they had hit an impossibly grand fusion of styles, laden with lavish production, gloomy folk passages, and an endless procession of skull-caving riffs. They even managed to impart a feeling of fallen grace onto grooves that weren’t that far off from nu-metal.

Along the way, they picked up a likeminded soul in Steven Wilson, who had been operating in a dangerously nerdy realm of his own. His band Porcupine Tree had spent the ’90s paying tribute to all manner of classic ’70s sounds, though often with a modernized studio sheen that attracted contemporary prog acolytes searching for one last drop at the bottom of the barrel. He may not have inspired much as a vocalist, but he demonstrated capabilities as a keyboardist and producer, showing an increasing willingness to adapt to the heavier alt-rock trends of the day. Upon meeting Opeth, he’d eventually embrace metal—that final sanctuary for the guitar-obsessed—as the real future of the genre.

After the Wilson-produced Blackwater Park launched Opeth to an international stage, the band was eager to work with him again, only this time with a slightly different concept in mind. They had all become so fond of their softer moments that they wanted to dedicate a whole album to the emotions beyond aggression they knew they could convey in their music. So for their hotly anticipated follow-up, they planned to write a double album: One half would consist of their heaviest material yet, while the other would be entirely clean sung and mellow. They even offered to amend their label contract to count both records as one album. The label agreed but insisted that they be released separately, five months apart.

Based on their titles—Deliverance and Damnation—you’d probably guess Damnation was the heavy one. While Deliverance follows more or less in the footsteps of Blackwater Park, Damnation digs into a strange new realm for the band, uncovering something even darker. Gone are the extended multi-part suites and intricate guitar workouts, replaced by slight, tender melodies engulfed in a striking emptiness. Wilson’s keyboards lurk around every corner, summoning vistas that are more claustrophobic than sprawling. Åkerfeldt sings as if he’s trapped in a never-ending goodbye, sighing about moonlit skies, faces glanced through windows, old photographs, “skin covering secret scars.” In “To Rid the Disease”’s morbid opening moments, he murmurs, “There’s nobody here/There’s nobody near/I try not to care/Dead eyes always stare.” It’s a lonely, lonely record, sweeping Opeth’s theatrics away to reveal the spectres underneath.

Shrouded in Wilson’s bank of MIDI Mellotrons, the band aimed to get as close as they could to recreating the world of their ’70s idols. But something is off. Besides the aforementioned keys, Damnation doesn’t actually sound much like prog. The mix is too crisp and modern, the songs too short, Åkerfeldt’s delivery methods too to-the-point. Perhaps it could pass as an album-length exploration of the opening two minutes of “Moonchild,” or, if you squint, the chilliest bits of Camel’s The Snow Goose. Truthfully, the band lands a lot closer to the wilted slowcore of groups like Red House Painters, miserable and intimate and distinctly informed by the ’90s.

In Opeth’s case, this manifests as a smoldering grunginess. Metal creeps around the margins, as on opener “Windowpane,” where the band turns over a tumbling 6/4 riff, holding a smoky extra 9th on the chord that gives everything an added layer of tension. Though the song is heavily acoustic, its distorted guitar solos hail squarely from the realm of harder rock, and the artificial choirs that seep in toward the end seem to call out to the symphonic citadels of the Norwegian black metallers.

Even compared to the quieter moments on their previous albums, the songwriting on Damnation is uniquely hollowed. On the central riff of “In My Time of Need,” Åkerfeldt holds only two frets down, plucking the rest of the chord on open strings and letting their smoggy notes reverberate hazily off one another. “Ending Credits” grows from a straightforward instrumental into a weeping dual guitar harmony by song’s end, and “Hope Leaves,” one of the album’s peaks, unfurls from hushed fingerpicking into a luminescent bath of bell-toned keys, picking up a surprisingly understated groove. Drummer Martin Lopez and bassist Martín Méndez (both of Uruguayan heritage) expand the band’s rhythm section beyond aggro blastbeats into subtler directions, guiding “Windowpane” through a tightly controlled, fluttering midsection jam, and gradually building “Closure” into a dissonant outro layered with Uruguayan tamboril.

At the time, Åkerfeldt claimed that Damnation’s deviation from metal would be a one-off for the band, but it only took a couple albums for him to drop his harsh vocals entirely and steer Opeth into the full-on prog worship they had always threatened. While those later albums included the kind of knotty, complex arrangements expected of the genre, none of them would come close to the emotional resonance they achieved on Damnation. The climaxes on this record never come in the form of a rapturous church organ bridge or an extended jazz freakout, but instead materialize in more nuanced tones, like the low acoustic strums that imbue the chorus of “In My Time of Need” with an epic dread, or Wilson’s pianos on “To Rid the Disease,” which float through the end of the song like dying leaves. For a band known for fitting as many ideas into their songs as physically possible, it’s striking to hear them write with such directness, to focus on feeling above all else.

That sense of despair could be because the album captured the band in a state of crisis. Arriving at their new studio, Nacksving in Gothenburg, with almost no material prepared, Åkerfeldt committed to writing his songs the night before each recording session, a process which—big surprise—backfired immediately. The studio itself was equipped with shoddy technology that constantly broke down, and combined with an uncaring technical staff and bandmates who regularly abandoned Åkerfeldt to go party, Opeth were on the verge of breaking up by the time they finally abandoned ship. They fled for Studio Fredman, where they had recorded their previous three albums, and Wilson arrived just in time to put the pieces back together and help get both records over the finish line.

During the mixing sessions, Åkerfeldt’s grandmother was hit by a car and killed. She’d given Åkerfeldt his first acoustic guitar as a child and inspired his passion for music. He considered her like a parent. “After she died, all the songs I’d written and the entire concept of these two albums had a different meaning to me,” Åkerfeldt later said. Before she passed away, he had only a vague conception of all this pain he was singing about. Both Deliverance and Damnation would be dedicated to her.

Listening to Damnation, one can almost hear the long tail of prog disappearing into an ether where hardly any traces of the original remains except as aching remembrance. Those digital Mellotrons balanced against Wilson’s dry 2000s alt-rock production cast Åkerfeldt’s ballads into a searching, uncanny drift at the outskirts of the metal landscape. While Åkerfeldt’s clean vocals may have been a dealbreaker for the “purer” side of the metal spectrum, going against the grain made Damnation even more of a fan favorite than Opeth expected. It’s praised by critics as one of their best albums and has earned regular spots on their setlists ever since. Even more, it’s their most accessible record, a welcoming entry point whether you’re comfortable with the heavier end of music or not.

Perhaps prog was never about an actual sound. John Peel, after helping to popularize the genre via British radio, would later damningly claim that “the one distinguishing feature about early ’70s progressive rock was that it didn’t progress.” Even a band like Opeth, unwavering custodians of 21st-century prog, hardly share much in common with other metal bands representing this style. If the genre’s only true marker is “progress,” then what’s a project like Opeth to do, striving to forge a path ahead while remaining eternally consumed by the past? On Damnation, they dug into their essence, channeling that longing for a lost time into their sparest music yet as they unburied ghostly new sorrows. In its gentle simplicity, Damnation now sounds like a portrait of prog at its resting place, all those symphonic suites and technical grandstands replaced by something barely there: a MIDI of a sample of some forgotten flute somebody once dreamed of playing long ago.