Joakim Svalberg

Joakim Svalberg — Swedish keyboardist — has been Opeth's keyboard player since 2011, joining the band in the phase when it definitively abandoned death metal. That context defines his function. Opeth began in the 1990s as a progressive death metal band — guttural vocals alternating with acoustic passages — and from Heritage (2011) onwards turned to progressive rock of a 1970s lineage, without guttural vocals, with Hammond organ, mellotron and arrangements recalling King Crimson and Camel. The keyboard is central to that transformation. It is not a matter of adding layers to an already-formed sound, but of supplying the very vocabulary of the new format: analogue timbres, organ textures and solo passages occupying the space once reserved for heavy guitar. The change divided the audience lastingly — part of Opeth's listeners never accepted the abandonment of death metal. But it produced one of the most coherent bodies of work in contemporary progressive rock, and Svalberg is a constitutive part of it.