"Ghost of Perdition"

2011. Opeth plays a concert somewhere in the US. Mikael Åkerfeldt no longer cares where he is. It’s been one of those tours that stretches on and on.

He’s had to “force-feed” the audience songs from Opeth’s newest release, Heritage. 

As usual, there’s a stirring of discontent. Mikael is not growling. These new songs aren’t “heavy”, at least not the kind of heavy the crowd expected. Isn’t Opeth death metal?

Between songs someone screams from the obscurity:

“Play some fucking metal!”

They’re coming to the end of the set when Åkerfeldt notices movement within the crowd. An audience member shoves his way to the front of the stage and slaps something down on the stage before him.

A glove. 

“Have I been challenged to a duel?”, he wonders.

This confrontation came late in Åkerfeldt’s own period of perdition:

This challenging era began just after the release of Blackwater Park (2001), one of Opeth’s most-loved albums. The moment the metal world really started to notice Opeth.

From the outside-looking-in, most of us would say that these were the years of Opeth’s rise to – if not fame – something akin to it. As close to fame as an off-kilter, gothic, proggy, acoustic fingerstyle, sometimes-death metal band can reach. 

The dual-hit of Deliverance (2002) and Damnation (2003) followed Blackwater Park. The latter was divisive, putting to the fore Opeth’s “lighter” side. But the duality of light and shade worked and the fanbase accepted the two albums as a whole, rather than separate entities.

Not long after, Opeth released Ghost Reveries (2005), their first album on Roadrunner Records, and the album many consider their magnum opus. Some fans accused the band of selling out by signing to a major label:

The band were given complete artistic freedom by the label – something which should very quickly be obvious to any listener (half of the songs are more than ten minutes in length.)

Sure, Ghost Reveries had the growls and the distortion that are the staple of death metal. But it’s also so much more. 

The opening track, “Ghost of Perdition” starts with a jump scare. 8 clean chords are strummed before the song erupts.

Throughout the song’s ten-and-a-half minutes, the band weave in unusual time signatures more associated with prog, as well as fingerpicked acoustic arrangements with clean vocals. These are juxtaposed by dark, unsettling passages to complement the song’s genuinely evil subject matter. It’s a complex musical soundscape, but one that’s ultimately accessible to more casual listeners. 

For a man living through his own period of darkness, the song would turn out to be more self-portrait than he may have intended.

Although “Ghost of Perdition” is objectively a long song, it never feels it. There’s too much happening to get bored. The clever musical arrangements keep pulling you back into the story, which is told as much through the sound and tone of the song, as it is through the lyrics. 

Åkerfeldt knows that this hybrid quality is ultimately what attracts the band’s core fanbase. And the musicians within the band need to perform accordingly:

That need to not “just” be a metalhead would be pushed to a proggy extreme in the 2010s (with the result that Mikael would be challenged to a dual.) But even on previous records, it was clear that the band were pushing the expected limits of the genre.

Despite the song’s success, few people seem to have successfully deciphered its lyrics. There is no consensus on its meaning. And Åkerfeldt rarely gives us meaningful insights into the meanings of his songs, preferring to remain elusive. 

On the surface, the song’s lyrics tell the nightmarish story of satanic possession. 

But the story is fragmented, not linear. It shifts back and forth in time. Åkerfeldt notes that the song was written in fragmented chunks.

The first verse opens where the story ends… at the mother’s deathbed. 

The imagery in these opening scenes feel ripped from The Exorcist (1973). The possessed mother’s hair lies in “black strands” on the bed. Her face is “twisted [...] upon the head” and her “earthly shell” has been cracked by the “Devil” who’d “foretold she was the one”. 

Between the jolt of the “jump scare” and the terror evoked by the opening lyrics, it’s clear we’ve been brought into a world that is hostile, horrific. We have not yet had time to consider “how” the woman is in this state. It’s notable that in The Exorcist too, the question of “how did this happen” remains secondary to the horror of the present state. 

But Akerfeldt does not leave the backstory unresolved for long. After the first verse, we are brought backwards to an earlier point in the timeline.

We’re told that the mother is restrained as the evil enters her:

But it’s not clear who restrained her.

Is it the supposed “son” of this mother? Is it the devil himself? Or perhaps, in some nightmarish twist, it’s the narrator himself, implicating us in the act.

First we need to narrow this down. It’s unlikely this act was performed by the “son” in question. He seems to be grieving, and fearing his mother’s imminent downfall:

The devil himself seems a more likely culprit. Although she offers some resistance to the darkness, eventually he penetrates her “inner light”. 

But it seems the “darkness” had been biding its time, waiting to “pull [her] under”. 

Eventually, she rises “up to its call” and falls into his arms, setting the demon free:

Questions still remain. Who is the narrator? And what role do they have to play in this woman’s demise?

It could be that they’re simply an onlooker or exorcist figure. Or is it the devil itself?

Åkerfeldt never resolves this question. That, I believe, is what makes the song truly terrifying. It makes us feel like we’re directly involved in this possession. That we have somehow spread evil into this maternal figure, like a bastardized version of the nativity story. 

It’s an inversion of the Immaculate Conception. We’re witnessing – or taking part in – this woman’s violation. We watch her being impregnated with evil, and do nothing. Or worse. We’re an active participant. In later verses, we’re beside her as she finishes her descent into madness:

The narrator’s voice is also more violent and ugly in these later sections, as if to reveal its (our?) ugly nature:

The final verse of the song moves us back to a more objective point of view.

We’re asked to imagine how the woman would be perceived if the “source of the flow” was cut off and she went back to how she was. Would the “righteous” ones among us still damn her as “mad”? Or would they finally see the evil that was allowed to take hold of her?

Because by rejecting her as a “victim” of phantasms, we allow her to be “preyed upon even further… and give the darkness a chance to infiltrate deeper and deeper. 

The “Ghost of Perdition” stuck in her chest has resulted in her becoming a pariah amongst her own people, so she too is trapped in this purgatorial state through to her death – a feeling shared too by Åkerfeldt while he was in the midst of the “shit” during his band’s rise.  

You can’t write about Opeth and ignore the feeling it evokes. 

Listening to Opeth brings you back in time. 

There are echoes of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) which, like “Ghost of Perdition”, also plunges the reader in media res, in other words, right into the heart of the action. And in the same way that many readers of Paradise Lost find themselves – often unwillingly – sympathising with the devil, we find ourselves carried along by the narrator, whose intentions throughout remain unknown. 

The language also evokes the Romantic poets – Keats, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth. The word “hemlock” appears in both “Ghost of Perdition” and in the opening lines of Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819). In Keats, the hemlock is a path toward oblivion – the speaker reaches for numbness because beauty is too painful to bear fully conscious. But in Åkerfeldt’s hands, hemlock is administered to someone. Where Keats aestheticises the desire to dissolve, "Ghost of Perdition" shows what it looks like when dissolution is done to you.

The Faustian shadow of Byron’s Manfred also falls across the song. Byron’s anti-hero summons dark spirits seeking forgiveness, but ultimately chooses death rather than submit to them. The mother in Opeth’s song has no such agency. She doesn’t choose the darkness, it’s channeled into her.

These writers, especially the Romantics, had their own complicated relationship with darkness. They wanted readers to ache. 

They understood that beauty could be the delivery mechanism for horror, that you could render something morally condemned with such lyrical force that your sympathies become unstable. 

You're not meant to admire Satan in Paradise Lost. And yet…

Åkerfeldt wasn’t just observing someone else's perdition from a comfortable distance. He was living through his own. The song works as a portrait of someone consumed – spiritually, psychologically – because its author understood that feeling intimately.

This is the true genius of “Ghost of Perdition”.

At the same time as Ghost Reveries was released, Opeth were saying goodbye to drummer Martin Lopez, due to severe physical and mental health issues. Soon after this, long-time guitarist Peter Lindgren would also leave, citing burnout.

And despite everything – the band shake-ups, the unhappy and sometimes violent fan reactions – Mikael remained motivated to work through his own period of perdition:

The mother in “Ghost of Perdition” is consumed by something she can't control. Åkerfeldt, during these years, understood that feeling. But he refused to let it win.

Ghost Reveries turned out to be the high-water mark of the formula he’d built – the death metal exterior with extended prog-folk interjections. Juxtaposed moments of dark and light. 

Six years later he'd stop growling entirely. Fans called it betrayal. One of them literally threatened him with violence.

But still… The growling didn't come back for sixteen years.

When it did, on Opeth’s most recent album, The Last Will and Testament (2024), it wasn't because the crowd had demanded it. As Mikael himself notes:

The growling came back when he was ready. 

Not before.

🤘 Horns up 🤘

Shane
Editor-in-Chief
The Chug Media