OPETH guitarist Fredrik Åkesson is featured in a new interview with Liz Ramanand at Loudwire. An excerpt is available below:

Q: Tell me a little about the new album ‘Heritage’ and how it differs from past albums.

Åkesson: "Mikael (Åkerfeldt) started writing the album and it started off with a couple of songs, it was more or less a continuation of the last album, Watershed, and we deleted those two tracks and we just wanted to do something different. We don’t want to repeat ourselves. It’s like in movies, the second one is usually crap, so we wanted to take a different sound approach, we wanted to do a really honest and free sound. There’s no sound replacements on the albums, it’s the real deal, no cheating."

Q: Mikael decided to approach the record in a new way by doing clean vocals, what was your approach to how you handled the guitar riffs on the record?

Åkesson: "Guitar sounding-wise, we talked about what kind of riffs we wanted to play on the next pick up, we turned down the distortion a bit, so we get more of a stringy kind of sound instead of hiding behind the wall of distortion. It’s more sensitive and delicate and solos, I tried to go for something that suits the song, really. I tried to do something that was different for each song and I think every song on the album is very different. It was a challenging album to record actually, it was a really cool vibe in the studio, to see all of that old gear which has been kept the same since 1960, so it was cool to use all of that old, vintage gear."

Click here for the complete interview.

The tracklist for Heritage is as follows:

'Heritage'

'The Devil's Orchard'

'I Feel the Dark'

'Slither'

'Nepenthe'

'Haxprocess'

'Famine'

'The Lines in My Hand'

'Folklore'

'Marrow of the Earth'

The new song called 'The Devil's Orchard' is streaming on YouTube below: