Stop comparing Opeth albums!
I increasingly think comparing Opeth albums as though they are all competing in the same category misses the point of what makes the band special.
People constantly argue things like:
“Blackwater Park is objectively better than Sorceress”
“Heritage is weaker than Ghost Reveries”
“Oldpeth destroys Newpeth”
But these albums are not trying to achieve the same thing.
It would be a bit like arguing whether Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is “better” than his late string quartets or piano sonatas.
They are different musical forms aiming at different emotional and artistic goals.
Blackwater Park (or any of the Golden Era Albums) feels like a monumental defining statement. It’s huge, dark, overwhelming, unified. It has the feeling of a magnum opus.
Sorceress feels more like a late-period artist making strange, earthy, gothic prog-rock because that’s genuinely where his interests had evolved. It’s less concerned with perfection or canonisation and more concerned with mood, texture, personality and exploration.
That doesn’t automatically make it lesser. Just different.
Same with Heritage. You can dislike it, but it’s clearly not trying to be Ghost Reveries II. It’s Mikael deliberately abandoning one artistic language to pursue another.
The great composers rarely spent their whole lives writing the exact same type of work over and over.
Their catalogue becomes a conversation between different phases of life, interests, emotions and artistic priorities.
It’s just like Mozart, Beethoven and Bach didn’t only compose grandiose symphonies which all vied to be their Magnum Opus!
Opeth feels more like that than almost any band I can think of, perhaps other than the Beetles.
Trying to flatten all those albums into one ranking system almost feels reductive.
You can still have favourites obviously. But I think Opeth becomes much richer when you stop asking:
“Which album is objectively best?” (Especially across periods)
…and start asking:
“What kind of experience is this album trying to create?”
And also:
“What does this album signify about Mikael’s musical journey and the composition of the band?”
*** Edit ***
Please continue to put out your tier lists, I agree it is good fun!
My point is more highlighting the innate difficulty of comparing “symphonic scale” type with albums that are deliberately less ambitious and/or are in a different musical genre.