Opeth live @ The Roundhouse, London.

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LIVE REVIEW: Opeth @ The Roundhouse, London
March 17, 2025Pavel Kondov


It would be tough to argue against the notion that OPETH are one of the most significant metal bands of the 21st century. Endlessly varied yet instantly recognisable, the brainchild of Mikael Åkerfeldt have amassed a rich catalogue and displayed mastery of progressive and extreme music in all its forms. 2024’s The Last Will And Testament was its best new addition in a decade, and as part of their Europe and UK touring cycle to promote it, OPETH made a sold-out stop to iconic London venue The Roundhouse.

Support comes in a diametrically-opposed fashion, in the face of traditional metal merchants GRAND MAGUS. The Swedish three-piece hit the filling-up Roundhouse with a doom-tinged brand of classic heavy metal, featuring uncomplicated riffs, catchy hooks and rip-roaring guitar solos. Frontman and lead guitarist Janne ‘JB’ Christoffersson is visually striking on stage, looking like a jacked younger version of Rob Halford, but his somewhat awkward stage banter between songs fails to connect. Still, the progressively-minded crowd responds positively to the rock n’ roll stylings of the Stockholm trio, capped off with a stunning audience singalong for set closer Hammer Of The North. More of an amuse bouche than an appetizer, GRAND MAGUS whet our appetite for the altogether more indulgent main course that’s to follow.

Rating: 6/10Opeth live @ The Roundhouse, London. Photo Credit: Karolina Janikunaite

The dimmed stage and the five silhouettes on it are suddenly illuminated by the ‘frame’ of disjointed screens that surrounds them, projecting artwork from The Last Will and Testament, as its opener §1 echoes through the North London venue. The shiver-inducing melodies and a growling Mikael Åkerfeldt are here to announce OPETH in all their glory. A double of fan-favourite epics Master’s Apprentices and The Leper Affinity follows to cement this impression, serving more head-ripping riffs in two songs than most bands write in an entire career.

These modern metal classics sound extra vibrant and exciting, and a big part of this is the inclusion of new drummer Waltteri Väyrynen (ex-PARADISE LOST). The thirty-year-old has injected new lifeblood into the quintet through his playing style that is aggressive, yet marked by dynamism and subtlety. His first recorded work sees him come up with some stunningly challenging drum parts – and Åkerfeldt himself jokes about the stupidly complex jobs they’ve given themselves while introducing §7 – but the band sounds like a well-oiled machine.Opeth live @ The Roundhouse, London. Photo Credit: Karolina Janikunaite

While the return of the death metal stylings are the topic of the day for OPETH, the Swedes don’t neglect to give a nod to their softer side. Deep cut Häxprocess gives us a reminiscence of the cult 70s folk-prog concerts that this historic venue has seen, whereas ballad In My Time Of Need sees the crowd relieve Åkerfeldt of singing duties during the choruses. The frontman is on familiar good form tonight, cracking dry jokes and exuding an aura of complete confidence. His high watermark comes after a peak in the set itself – the jubilant reception to Ghost Of Perdition makes him exclaim “haven’t we been fucking great tonight?”. Yes, Mikael, you bloody have.

The odd thing about an OPETH concert is that it can only ever scratch the surface. Two hours of playing only encompass ten songs and entirely gloss over some of their most beloved albums, yet main set closer A Story Never Told once again cements the great reception of the new material. The encore is time to land the plane home safely. Sorceress crushes with its bulldozing main motif, while Deliverance – a song steadily becoming their equivalent of Free Bird – finally brings us to progressive death nirvana.



Simultaneously virtuosic and direct, with a live show that makes your jaw drop at its technical brilliance while maintaining a lightness of touch, OPETH remain a live force to be reckoned with.

Rating: 10/10

Check out our photo gallery of the night’s action in London from Karolina Janikunaite here:
























































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INTRODUCING: Caelestra

Some people seem to have unending creative potential. One of those is CAELESTRA; for such a cosmic enormity, the project is in fact the soul work of Bristol based multi-instrumentalist Frank Harper. We caught up with him about his latest record Bastion, the human experiences behind the scenes, and finding time to create his own character action figures.



For something so fully fledged, it would give DEVIN TOWNSEND envy, CAELESTRA only started up in the lockdown of 2020. “I had accumulated a bunch of ideas for my previous band, FEVER SEA,” Frank describes. “We had been inactive for a while and kept trying to get the ball rolling again but it never came to much, so I would be writing riffs etc for that which ultimately went unused. So rather than let them go to waste, when the lockdown happened and I suddenly had all this time, I thought ‘why not make a record myself?’ and that’s where CAELESTRA started.”



The scope for Bastion is virtually unending. From post-rock ambience, all the way through to full on blackened prog, it’s a vast, awe-inspiring sound. “I guess it comes from a few things, really,” Frank muse. “I’m heavily inspired by film scores. Especially those from 80s sci-fi and fantasy. So I always wanted to do something that incorporated that unique nostalgic feel but in a way that sounded bombastic and huge. And with my background in progressive black metal and post-metal. I guess it was always going to have some of those dynamics and traits. I think a lot of the leg work in finding the sound was done on [first record release] Black Widow Nebula and Bastion has been an exercise in trying to build upon and refine that sound.”


There’s also a fair amount of cosmic world building gone into CAELESTRA as a project. The narrative takes you on an epic journey that lives up to the music that contains it. “I had the rough idea of the story that takes place throughout the record when I started. So, I had a direction to take the music, but often times the music I would come up with would impact the story. Usually for the better! So, it was kind of a back and forth of visualising the story, writing music, seeing what the music would do to my mental imagery and then responding and reacting again. The record is a product of that process, for sure.”

“The lyrical narrative is definitely the through line,” Frank agrees. “And though I record non-chronologically, with each song as its own stand-alone thing, in my head I very much know what part of the narrative each song speaks to. For instance, the song Lightbringer is the middle of the record and the middle of the narrative, but was recorded last. I work on the songs I can visualise best at that moment in time.”



As with all creative output, being a single entity has it’s pros and cons. While you have the liberty t set your own parameters, it’s sometimes hard to know when to say that a piece of work is complete. “Yes, absolutely,” he agrees. “And quite often my first instincts are to go way overboard with the layers and textures! As it stands, my latest record Bastion is incredibly dense in terms of its layers but, initially, it was even more so. Through the process of mixing my producer Charlie Nevett and I would decide whether parts were essential or not, and then work backwards, editing the unnecessary things out from there.”

External to this mystical interstellar story, there’s a very real centre to the work Frank makes.
“This record is incredibly personal to me, and I’ve used it as a tool to come to terms with things in my personal life,” he explains. “The record for me deals specifically with themes surrounding cystic fibrosis, a degenerative lung condition that my wife has. So, for me, it’s very much about how I came to wrap my head around that one specific thing, albeit through the lens of a loose sci-fi story/concept. But ultimately, it’s about accepting the things you can’t change regardless of all those things we would do to change them, and being thankful for the things you have for no matter how short a time you might have them for. It’s cathartic for me and I hope that it makes anyone that might listen to it feel better about their situation, even if only briefly, and that they find it cathartic in that way too.”

It also appears that Frank wasn’t content with taking on the behemoth of producing his own albums single-handedly, but he also created his own figures to go along with the record. “Seeing as my music has a story and characters, I thought it would be a great thing to do myself and help sell the world of CAELESTRA,” he positively enlightens. “I’m a professional sculptor in the stop motion animation industry, so it wasn’t too far a stretch to sculpt, print and paint some Wayfarers (it did end up being a lot of work, though!). I feel that with the kind of 80’s Sci-fi and Fantasy reverence as a running theme through CAELESTRA, action figures that harken back to those times made sense. But yes, I definitely need to give a shout out to Luke Oram [who did the artwork for my previous release] and a band he collaborated with called WALLOWING for giving me the idea!”



While CAELESTRA is unequivocally Frank Harper’s intergalactic baby, there’s every likelihood that we could be seeing a live incarnation of his music with a fuller compliment of musicians. “I have a few musician friends that are keen to help me bring this stuff to the stage. I’d most likely step back from any instrumental duties and focus mainly on my vocal performance, but I’m not ruling out rhythm guitar! So far, I have a drummer, bassist and a guitarist lined up and we’ll most likely play a backing track that holds most of the synth instrumentation. It’s early days in that regard! We’ll have a lot of kinks to iron out, but yes, ultimately the goal is to bring CAELESTRA to a live setting at some point this year.”

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The Hellacopters: Into Overdrive

When it comes to high octane, wonderfully anthemic and life affirming rock n roll, you can’t get better than THE HELLACOPTERS. For the past three decades, the band have captivated with their music, and in 2025, with their brand new album Overdriver, they show absolutely no signs of letting up.



To celebrate the release of the new album, we caught up with THE HELLACOPTERS drummer Robert Eriksson to hear all about Overdriver and three decades of total rock action!



We kick things off with Robert telling us about the creation of Overdriver and the selection of songs to make a full album experience. “In the way of recording, whenever we talk about making it, we always think in terms of records, the last song on the A side, the first song on the B side, and the last song on the album, in terms of making a fluid experience,” he says. “The first single of the album, that’s the album closer, which is a bit unusual, but it fitted as a closing song on the album, because of the long ending and such, so we do think very much in terms of a full album.”

Robert then discusses the eclectic nature of Overdriver and how it comes to represent where THE HELLACOPTERS are right now musically and how melody plays a big part in that. “I think it’s more varied in total than any of our other albums. There’s a couple of power pop tracks, there’s a couple of moodier, slower songs, there’s a couple of rockers and faster songs and personally, I like that a lot. This time, I think we did a good amount of variation, and there’s a lot of melodies within a few of the songs.”

With THE HELLACOPTERS being such on exciting live band, Robert then tells us how excited he is to bring the songs of Overdriver to life in a live setting. “It’s always fun to see the reactions of people! It’s getting harder to do a set list, that’s for sure, because, personally, I would want to play a bunch of the songs from the new album. I don’t think we can play all eleven, because that would mean we have to take away a lot of our other material.”


As well as the new album, THE HELLACOPTERS recently celebrating thirty years since they formed (give or take a few years on hiatus!), Robert told of his pride at this impressive feat. “It is weird that it is three decades since we thought about this and started talking about it. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished but what I’m really proud that we’re still actually enjoying what we do, and it feels good to still do it.”

Talk then turned to the longevity of THE HELLACOPTERS, as Robert gives his opinion on how the band have stayed relevant for so long in perhaps an unorthodox way. “Maybe it was good that we split up for a few years. That’s kind of weird, but there was a few years that we didn’t play. We split the band up and started again, which was not the plan at all. I guess at the time it made sense, because there was not enough motivation to take it any further in 2008 but we’ve always remained friends, and there were never any fights that some bands have. I think we stay true to ourselves and it’s more for the sake of having fun and playing it in the long run.”

RØRY: Self-Forgiveness Revolution

As artists, there’s always a hope of development from project to project. No artist has had quite the journey and the positive road to recovering and self-acceptance as RØRY. The unapologetic approach to her debut album RESTORATION has been a huge, bold embrace of who she is as a person. “I felt that way in the writing and recording,” she agrees wholeheartedly. “This is this is more powerful and maybe a little bit more unhinged than I thought it was going to be. I felt my last two EPs, I was very much still trying to be something, whereas with this, I felt very embodied to tell the stories, I took a lot more risks.”



From her sold out shows, to playing at huge festivals, it feels like RØRY has just about started to embrace that maybe she is, genuinely, really good at this, and that her music is actually quite special.



“I do feel a lot more confident. I think if you’re going to start rapping [on a song] as a forty-year-old person, you need to have some kind of confidence or maybe insanity. Perhaps there, there’s a fine line between the two.” There’s a constant sense of good-humoured self-awareness with RØRY, but also the grace to be kind and fair with her experiences. “My first EP, I was crippled with self-doubt and self-hatred, and I remember trying to throw the whole thing away, and just couldn’t listen to it. I wasn’t proud of it, and it was really heavy to actually get it out – it blew my mind that people liked it. And then the second one, it was like, ‘oh, this is okay. I’m doing my best’, but I didn’t love it. But with the album, the self-hatred bit, it just never came. I’ve never listened and thought, ‘I hate this. I’m so embarrassed’. I’m just like, ‘no, I sign off on that – I’m happy.’ That’s grown in a way that I am really proud of and I never would have imagined going back to my first single. I could never have imagined being the type of artist that could write and sing and then perform these songs. That’s the beauty of artist development. And we don’t really have enough of these days from major labels. I guess I’ve kind of done it for myself, but you have to give yourself time, because you never know where you’re going to grow and what it’s going to look like. It certainly surprised me, so it would perhaps surprise some other people as well, which is very exciting.”

From the moment intro track If Pain Could Talk, What Would It Say jabs out, it’s clear that RØRY is finally starting to be comfortable flexing her skills. “It’s funny because it’s the album intro, but it’s one of my favourite songs,” she beams. “I think because it’s unexpected, I’ve never done anything like that before. I was just aiming to do something similar [to the intro’s of my EP’s] and it just came out. It happened really, really quickly with the producer. He was just playing guitar, and I was like, ‘make it a bit heavier’ and it just poured out. It’s bang on what I what I feel the album is about, which is allowing the darkest parts, the most hurt parts of you, not only to speak, but to validated and exist.”


There’s a lot of reflecting in RØRY’s music, but while this record as a whole tackled those darker parts of her past, there’s never any judgement on that younger person. The most joyful embodiment of that self-acceptance is without doubt SORRY I’M LATE. “So, on the last day we were meant to be finishing another song, I came in and was like, ‘we need to write something else. These nine songs are fucking heartbreaking, or, like insane. There’s nothing happy’. And it just came out,” RØRY recalls. “We wrote it in about an hour, which is always a good sign that you’ve hit something that just feels really good. It just felt like the perfect little cherry on top of all the other heaviness. It’s still heavy, it talks about my mum dying and addiction, but it’s in this light hearted way that says, ‘yeah, we’re going to show up anyway, even if we are a bit late, it’s all good’.”

RESTORATION as a whole is hard set on embracing the past, from personal to professional and all the messy areas between that. “A lot of this album comes from shameful places,” she goes on to explain about the feature of herself on the track Hold On. “I had numerous artist projects that I’ve done over the last two decades, but the main one was under my birth name Roxanne Emery, fifteen years ago. I released an album and then when that didn’t work out, I moved into selling my vocals, featuring on dance songs. You know, sell your vocal for five hundred quid so I could pay rent and buy alcohol and drugs, that was where my kind of artistry was at. I have all these songs that don’t reflect where I am today as an artist, and I felt embarrassed about it. And it was the desire to reclaim that with my old name. It feels like such a nice way to address something that has caused me some pain and some embarrassment, which is just to wear it out loud. That’s what I’m doing at the moment with the things that I hate most about myself. I’m just telling the world.”



What RØRY has managed to do with her music is to give a voice to the parts of ourselves that feel ugly and unlovable, and champion them as part of a multifaceted human being. “Yeah, 100% that’s the whole thread of the album, really, is you can have done the dumbest stuff ever, which I have done, but still build a beautiful life, still experience grace and forgiveness.”RØRY live @ Tramshed, Cardiff. Photo Credit: Serena Hill Photography

“I remember feeling for so many years, the weight of all of the things I regretted and I hated about myself. Obviously, the normal stuff, there’s body image stuff, and there’s low self-esteem, but it’s also how I treated friends, ex partners; history with self harm, drug addiction, stealing. Just like the worst things people can do. I wore the weight of that for so long, even when I got sober, it was a sense that I always deserve to be punished. But actually, I’ve experienced total restoration. And I can look back on that version of me, and sometimes it’s still a little embarrassing, but I can look back with understanding, even compassion. I think that’s such an important lesson for so many people.”

The culmination of this inner peace RØRY has created for her self with her music as morphed into an outward space for people to embrace the parts of themselves they’d otherwise shy away from. Her shows have become a place people feel safe to cry and sing their hearts out in, with friends and strangers alike. “Oh, that makes me bit sad in the best way, and it feels so special to be performing live and to have everyone together and a sense of real community, through pain, through loss, through wanting to get better,” RØRY hold her hand to her face as she reflects on the way her shows come together. “But people are so vulnerable; They’re so authentic; They’re so real in the crowd. It’s so humbling and just wonderful to see. I think that’s what music is for. That’s what it’s been for me. And I did my first gig as RØRY, only just over two years ago. So, it’s gone really quick. And the reason it’s gone quick is people that come to shows and seem to enjoy being sad in a group environment. So, I’m very grateful for that.”



Going forwards as RESTORATION is set free into the world, there’s a sense of pride in what RØRY has achieved, and the doors she’s opening for herself and her community, through music. The road ahead might be tough, but it can also be wonderful if we accept ourselves and each other; things don’t have to be broken forever. They can be restored.

RESTORATION is out now via SADCØRE Records.

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