Martin Lopez

Martin Lopez — born in 1978 — was Opeth's drummer between 1997 and 2006, a period including the band's best-known albums. He was born in Uruguay and grew up in Sweden, and that origin has an audible consequence. Lopez does not play in the language of Scandinavian death metal: his drumming carries inflections of Latin percussion and phrasing of jazz descent, with cymbals used as colour, asymmetric fills and a sense of swing that practically does not exist in the genre. In a repertoire alternating extreme metal, acoustic passages and progressive rock sections, that is exactly what the material asks for. He recorded My Arms, Your Hearse (1998), Still Life (1999), Blackwater Park (2001), Deliverance (2002), Damnation (2003) and Ghost Reveries (2005) — the run that established Opeth internationally. He left the band in 2006 for health problems related to anxiety attacks, which prevented him from sustaining the touring pace. Years later he formed Soen, a progressive metal project in which he resumed activity on a more controlled scale. The bassist Martín Méndez, his rhythm-section partner in Opeth, is also Uruguayan — an unusual coincidence in a Swedish band.