On August 18, 1998, OPETH released their third album, My Arms, Your Hearse, simultaneously through Candlelight in Europe and Century Black in the US — the record where the Swedes stopped being a promising death metal band and became something no one else was. Recorded at Studio Fredman in Gothenburg, it is a concept album about a dead man's ghost who refuses to accept his death, drifts back toward the living, and is slowly forgotten. Mikael Åkerfeldt structured it so that each song's final words name the next track, closing the loop in the epilogue. He handled vocals, guitars, bass and piano himself after the departure of bassist Johan DeFarfalla; it was the first OPETH album with drummer Martin Lopez. The result moved fluidly between crushing growled passages and fragile acoustic sections, and remains a cornerstone of progressive death metal.
