Sweden's prog legends Opeth have, after a postponement, released their 14th studio album, The Last Will And Testament, through Moderbolaget / Reigning Phoenix Music. To celebrate the release, the band has served a lyric video for the song "§4", featuring a guest flute appearance by Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson.

Opeth's frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt comments on the track: "'§4' is an oddball song, just written by instinct. I'm not a clever guy when it comes to writing music. People call us 'thinking man's metal', I think that's laughable. I listen to music from so many different genres, it's impossible to me to stick to one genre. I find the idea boring to try and belong somewhere, we're a bit all over the place, and I think this song shows our diversity. For '§4' I was inspired by something called 'twelve note music', which I think is a classical term, where you're supposed to play twelve notes and you cannot repeat a note twice. I heard some of that music by classical pianists playing, and it sounds wicked, it sounds evil, it sounds really strange - so that inspired the initial guitar theme. There's a mellotron theme in the beginning, it just sounds odd, like it doesn't fit in, almost like a free-form jazz solo or something like that. But it quickly kind of lands in an almost traditional metal theme with a common response type death metal vocal that has a stereo double-tracked normal vocal response. I can't remember what happened during the writing process, but I reached a point where I just stopped and felt, 'OK, time for something strange!' We ended up with a flute solo by Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, which was kind of an accident in a way because I asked him to do a narration, not flute. As he was doing the spoken word bits, he asked me 'do you need a flute solo?' I was like, 'yes, please!', while I didn't really have a part for a flute solo! I had to shuffle through the songs quickly in my head before he would change his mind. I had him on the hook, of course, I was gonna find a piece! So, he played almost like a common response type flute solo in '§4'. This is a great song with the ending piece being one of the more evil pieces of music I've written in a long time: it sounds really menacing, sick almost!"

For more regarding The Last Will And Testament, and Opeth's European tour 2025 dates, follow HEREs. Link