How OPETH’s MIKAEL ÅKERFELDT Got Into Vinyl Collecting

In a recent interview with The Vinyl Hunters, OPETH frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt discussed his passion for vinyl and record collecting.

“ I think I started collecting music more than a format,” he said. “I’m born in 1974. And I didn’t really have money growing up, so we would borrow — my circle of friends were borrowing records. Somebody bought the new [JUDAS] PRIEST record and the rest of us would tape it; we would record it on to tape. And I bought some record and my friends would tape it. So that was like a collecting thing, just to have lots of music. That’s still the most important thing to me, to surround myself with music.

“Then, of course, I’ve grown fond of the format, the vinyl format. And when I was young, of course, that’s all it was, and cassettes. I started, I think, more seriously starting collecting once the CDs came out in the late ’80s, because people were throwing vinyl out — literally. You could find it in the garbage bin, like entire record collections.

“I went down to a garbage bin, [and I found the] whole DEEP PURPLE discography, and it’s, like, ‘Oh my god.’ So I bought CDs, but I always preferred LPs, and to this day, that’s basically the only format I use. So that’s how I kinda started collecting. In the late ’80s, I could go into a secondhand record shop and pick up a VAN DER GRAAF [GENERATOR] record for a pound. And I didn’t have any money, but I did have like the equivalent of a pound. So you could take a chance on stuff. And, of course, I bought a lot of s**t records, but also a lot of really good records.”

OPETH is set to release their 14th studio album, The Last Will And Testament, on November 22 through Reigning Phoenix Music/Moderbolaget.

The Last Will And Testament is a concept album set in the post-World War I era, unfolding the story of a wealthy, conservative patriarch whose last will and testament reveals shocking family secrets. The narrative weaves through the patriarch’s confessions, the reactions of his twin children, and the mysterious presence of a polio-ridden girl who the family have taken care of. The album begins with the reading of the father’s will in his mansion. Among those in attendance is a young girl, who, despite being an orphan and polio-ridden, has been raised by the family. Her presence at the will reading raises suspicions and questions among the twins.

The Last Will And Testament is the darkest and heaviest record OPETH has made in decades, and it is also the band’s 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 Åkerfeldt has ever written.