A Concert Trails Journey
Opeth in Bangalore, after 14 years — and metalheads came from all over India for it. I heard, and saw, people who had travelled in from Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai. There must be a reason so many picked Bangalore over the Mumbai date the night before, and standing in that crowd, it felt like the right call.
Fourteen years since the last one
The last time Opeth played Bangalore was 5 February 2012, headlining the Summerstorm Festival at Palace Grounds on the Heritage tour. Their India story goes back further than that — a first-ever Indian show in Chennai at IIT’s Saarang festival in January 2009 — and it continued with a festival set at NH7 Weekender in Pune in 2019. A Bangalore headline night has been a long time coming.
Three songs from that 2012 set made it into this one: “The Devil’s Orchard,” “The Drapery Falls,” and “Deliverance,” which closed the night both times.
Next to a mall
The pre-show was unusually quiet for a metal show. Then the crowd gathered, and by the time Opeth took the stage the whole area was packed. Two bands opened: Rainburn and Fallen Letters.
It’s a strange venue. Mikael Åkerfeldt said as much from the stage, pointing out that it’s next to a mall. Nobody cared.
The night
The moment Opeth walked on, the crowd went wild. Every song was sung back at the band — headbanging, moshing, screaming — and the performance was electrifying.
Mikael talked to the crowd a lot between songs, asking for food recommendations and telling us he’d tried Indian coffee with chicory and liked it. He was amazed by the size of the crowd and said he was already thinking about coming back for a many-city India tour. At one point he joked that this was The Truman Show, and that the whole crowd were actors.
Fredrik Åkesson, who has been on guitar with the band since 2007, was in full form and in the groove, nailing every note and every bend.
A set that runs from 1998 to 2024
This is the Last Will and Testament tour, built around the 2024 album of the same name — a concept record about a wealthy patriarch’s will being read to his heirs, with each track a paragraph from it. It’s the album that brought the death growls back for the first time since Watershed in 2008, and Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson guests on it with flute and spoken word. Three songs from it were in the Bangalore set: “§1,” which opened the night, plus “§7” and “§3.” Setlist.fm notes a spoken-word sample of Anderson’s voice in the live “§3.”
Around those, the set moved across the catalogue: ten of the band’s fourteen studio albums were represented in twelve songs. “Demon of the Fall” from My Arms, Your Hearse (1998) and “Godhead’s Lament” from Still Life (1999) came from the early years, “The Drapery Falls” from Blackwater Park (2001, produced with Steven Wilson), and “Windowpane” from Damnation (2003), the band’s first all-clean-vocal album. “Hjärtat vet vad handen gör” (“Heart in Hand”) came from the 2019 album In Cauda Venenum, sung here in its Swedish version. The main set closed on “Hex Omega” from Watershed, and “Deliverance” took the encore, with a “Hope Leaves” teaser and a crowd singalong leading into it.
A weird venue, but who cares — this was the evening metalheads from all over India gathered in the brotherhood of metal.
Amazing show.
See the photos from the night →
Setlist — Bhartiya Mall of Bengaluru, October 4
Openers: Rainburn, Fallen Letters
- §1 — The Last Will and Testament (2024)
- Hjärtat vet vad handen gör — In Cauda Venenum (2019)
- Godhead’s Lament — Still Life (1999)
- §7 — The Last Will and Testament (2024)
- The Devil’s Orchard — Heritage (2011)
- Windowpane — Damnation (2003)
- The Grand Conjuration — Ghost Reveries (2005)
- Demon of the Fall — My Arms, Your Hearse (1998)
- §3 — The Last Will and Testament (2024), with a spoken-word sample by Ian Anderson
- The Drapery Falls — Blackwater Park (2001)
- Hex Omega — Watershed (2008)
Encore:
- Deliverance — Deliverance (2002), preceded by a “Hope Leaves” intro teaser with crowd singalong
Planning a trip around a show of your own? The practical side — where to stay, how to get there — lives in the Opeth Bangalore travel guide.