Opeth are one of my all-time favourite bands, I first saw them back in 2003 and have seen them… uh… probably six? times since then, though not since 2013 when we moved to our house and it became more of a pain getting home late at night. With the advent of the Metro now it’s significantly easier, at least as long as you’re going in the general area of somewhere that’s serviced by the Metro, and so I leapt on the tickets when they went on sale for Opeth’s show at the Sydney Opera House. It’s a slightly odd venue for a metal show because it’s all seating, though the seats do that flipping-up thing you get in movie theatres (I appreciated the seating because I’m an old 😛), but the sound and the lighting were excellent.
I arrived pretty much bang-on 8pm when the opening band was starting, and missed the first half of their set because I was waiting in the merch line to get a tour shirt, but the last couple of songs that I was in the concert hall for were really good. The band is called Caligula’s Horse though irritatingly they have a Bandcamp page with absolutely nothing on it. They’ve got a kind of epic prog metal thing going on, so definitely check them out if that’s up your alley.
Opeth came on right on schedule at about 9:10pm which was a nice change from things running late. I’ve seen a few bands that were just boring as hell on stage, where the vocalist doesn’t interact with the crowd (looking at you, Megadeth), but the frontman from Opeth is thankfully very much not in that vein, and I’d forgotten how hilarious he is, he’s got a very dry sense of humour. Some choice quotes follow:
Encouraging the crowd to sing along to To Rid The Disease (one of the songs off their Damnation album, the whole album doesn’t have any growling):
Feel free to sing along!
…the lyrics are a bit shit, it’s because we’re Swedish. Just correct the grammar and sing along!
On the fact that the track names on their latest album (with the exception of the last track) are named “§1”, “§2”, “§3”, etc:
We had the record labels come to us to ask how people are meant to find the tracks on Spotify given when they’re named like that.
I don’t care! We’re not naming our tracks based on how easy they are to find on fucking Spotify!
On the fact that the crowd was sitting:
I’m an awful concert-goer, I’ll always sit down. For us playing here, it’s better if you stand.
But if it was me, I’d sit.
Towards the end of the show when he was doing the giving a shoutout for each band member:
And we have a youngster on drums, Waltteri Väyrynen! He’s 30. 31? He was born the same year we put out our first record.
It hurts.
The setlist was interesting, there weren’t any songs off their most proggy mid-era albums. The Devil’s Orchard from their Heritage album is probably the closest, that album was definitely where they really started veering into prog, but I think it’s also probably the heaviest song from the album.
- §1 (The Last Will and Testament, 2024)
- Master’s Apprentices (Deliverance, 2002)
- The Leper Affinity (Blackwater Park, 2001)
- §7 (The Last Will and Testament, 2024)
- The Devil’s Orchard (Heritage, 2011)
- To Rid the Disease (Damnation, 2003)
- The Grand Conjuration (Ghost Reveries, 2005)
- §3 (The Last Will and Testament, 2024)
- Demon of the Fall (My Arms, Your Hearse, 1998)
- Ghost of Perdition (Ghost Reveries, 2005)
- Deliverance (Deliverance, 2002)
The last track there was the encore, and I’ve definitely seen them play that on multiple prior occasions as the encore final track, and man is it an excellent song to finish on!
As with Heilung in 2023, I was able to get some pretty decent photos (though a straight-up metal band is less of a theatrical spectacle compared to Heilung!) and with the improvements in my iPhone 16 Pro I didn’t even need to run them through any denoising. These are my favourite shots, the full set is on Flickr.
