Ranking Every Opeth Studio Album From Worst To Best
11. Heritage (2011)
The initial entry into Opeth’s post-2010 exploration of vintage jazz fusion, folk rock, and prog rock richness, Heritage found the quintet completely and controversially abandon their trademark death metal singing and musical ferocity.
It’s also their last album with keyboardist Per Wiberg – whose head can be seen symbolically falling from the tree on the cover – and the first in a spiritual trilogy that also includes Steven Wilson’s Grace for Drowning and Storm Corrosion’s self-titled debut. Thus, this 10th studio album is consequential for a number of reasons.
Despite being highly likable and commendable overall, though, Heritage is easily the weakest of their recent run. It’s possibly their biggest case of style over substance, too, since several songs – I Feel the Dark, Slither, Nepenthe, and The Lines in My Hand – are either too simplistic or too meanderingly impressionistic to sufficiently entice.
That’s not to say that they’re bad tracks, but rather that they don’t do enough with their potential, so they come across more like demos and scraps of ideas than fully developed compositions. Luckily, a few other pieces – The Devil’s Orchard, Famine, and Folklore – are true gems, and Opeth would rebound brilliantly with their next "observation" (as Åkerfeldt puts it).