Opeth

Following the release of their fourteenth studio album The Last Will and Testament last year, Swedish prog-rock outfit Opeth have today announced a show in the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre for 2nd August 2026. 

Tickets €67.20/€72.20/€92.75 (Inc Booking Fee) from Ticketmaster.ie. Bookings Subject To 12.5% Service Charge Per Ticket (Max €10.50)

More than three decades into their career, Opeth have trained their admirers to expect the unexpected. But even by their own standards, the Swedish progressive titans have conjured something extraordinary this time around. The Last Will & Testament, is the darkest and heaviest record they have made in decades, it is also the most fearlessly progressive. A concept album recounting the reading of one recently deceased man’s will to an audience of his surviving family members, it brims with haunting melodrama, shocking revelations and some of the wildest and most unpredictable music that songwriter/frontman Mikael Åkerfeldt has ever written.

“I have become quite interested in family, and the idea that blood is not always thicker than water,” Åkerfeldt explains. “I became interested in how family members can turn on each other. I saw an interview with this guy whose family had all turned against him, over the inheritance, so I wrote a song about that on the last record. The idea stuck with me, and then along came the TV show Succession, and I loved that series. That was in the back of my head too. It felt like an interesting topic that you could twist and turn a little bit.”

The follow-up to 2019’s widely acclaimed In Cauda Venenum; The Last Will & Testament is set in the shadowy, sepia-stained 1920s. It slowly reveals its secrets like some classic thriller from the distant, cobwebbed past, with each successive song shining more light on the stated machinations of our dead (but definitely not harmless) protagonist. The emotional chaos of the story is perfectly matched by Opeth’s vivid but claustrophobic soundtrack, which artfully winds its way towards a crestfallen but sumptuous finale. Masters of their own idiosyncratic musical domain, Opeth have never sounded more unique. 

“It’s a restless record for me,” adds Åkerfeldt. “It’s an explosion of ideas, which I like. It’s a bit shorter and snappier. But I definitely didn’t want to rehash anything. The only thing that has come back is some of those death metal screams, but the mindset is still much more forward looking. In typical Opeth fashion, it’s not a direct record that you understand and that you love or hate right away. It takes time and if you put that time into it, you might like it… or hate it! It feels like it was written on a whim. Which it was, in a way! I hear things on this album and think, where the fuck did that come from?”