Opeth Talk Grand- Scale New Album ‘In Cauda Venenum' And India Trip

The prog frontrunners’ guitarist Fredrik Åkesson on the process of making their new record in Swedish and English and their upcoming third performance in the country

- Anurag Tagat

On swedish prog band opeth’s epic new album In Cauda Venenum (out last week via Nuclear Blast and the band’s own label Moderbolaget Records) there’s billowing synth lines but also a little girl’s voice that makes the transition from “Garden of Earthly Delights/Livets Trädgård” to “Dignity/Svekets Prins.” Over the phone from a pub in Stockholm, guitarist Fredrik Åkesson tells Rolling Stone India that the voice is of his daughter, who was five years old at the time.

Åkesson translates the line from Swedish to say, “If you stop thinking, you’re going to end up dead.” It’s certainly morbid but the guitarist is quick to add, “Mikael [Akerfeldt, vocalist-guitarist]’s daughter and my daughter, they just came up with that phrase on their own. Nobody told her what to say. Mikael just had this idea that they’re just going to improvise. They were asked some questions, which led to some pretty strange answers.”

As much as In Cauda Venenum (Latin for “Poison in the Tail”) is all about twisted progressive rock (and a bit of metal too), the voice samples featured in the songs add to the intriguing nature of a record that was originally written and recorded with Swedish lyrics. It features samples taken from old Swedish cartoons, a speech of the former Prime Minister Olof Palme, as well as the band’s youngest collaborators. With the Swedish version recorded first, Opeth then translated everything to English, for perhaps accessibility’s sake. Åkesson says, “First when I heard the idea, I wondered what it would sound like, but when I heard the first song ‘All Things Will Pass’ – the last track on the album which is pretty epic – I thought, ‘This sounds pretty cool. It works.’”