Martín Méndez — born in 1978 — has been Opeth's bassist since 1997, which makes him the band's second longest-serving member, behind only Mikael Åkerfeldt. He was born in Uruguay and moved to Sweden in his youth. He joined Opeth at the same time as the drummer Martin Lopez, also Uruguayan — an entire rhythm section of South American origin inside a Scandinavian death metal band, a coincidence with a concrete sonic effect: both brought a rhythmic vocabulary distinct from what the genre practised. His function in the repertoire is complex. Opeth's compositions alternate death metal, acoustic folk and progressive rock within a single track, and the bass has to change language along with them — holding weight in the heavy sections and taking on independent melodic lines in the open passages, where there is room for it. It is structural reading, not a repeated pattern. He is on practically the band's entire discography since My Arms, Your Hearse (1998), including the turn to progressive rock from Heritage (2011) and the return of guttural vocals on The Last Will and Testament (2024).
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