"You want a smack in the face in the beginning." How Ghost Of Perdition went from a concept about Satanism to the defining Opeth anthem

Opeth 2005.

When you think of Opeth – a band who’ve dealt in grand, 10-minute-plus songs for three decades now – ‘immediacy’ isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. But that’s exactly what the Stockholm adventurers were striving for when they penned Ghost Of Perdition.

After just eight gentle guitar strums, the first track on 2005’s Ghost Reveries plummets into a death metal hellscape, with Mikael Åkerfeldt abruptly howling, ‘Ghost of mother! Lingering death!’