As a follow-up to the hugely successful Blackwater Park, Opeth had planned a double album split into two distinct halves. Deliverance focused on the Swedes’ death metal elements and contained some of their heaviest songs, while sister-piece Damnation experimented with a much mellower progressive rock sound. In the end they were released as two separate albums six months apart.

The title-track to Deliverance straddled the two styles, providing a 13-minute-plus slice of genius that remains a fan-favourite today. Here, Opeth mainman Mikael Åkerfeldt tells us about the song’s painful birth, including how it was inspired by a real-life hostage situation…

“I had a lot of courage after Blackwater Park. We’d had a lot of success with that album and people were excited about us, but what that led to was me taking on more work than I could handle. So when we went in to do Deliverance and Damnation, I had no songs written. Nothing. No finished songs and we had two albums to record. The record company initially said no to the idea because they thought we wanted to get out of the contract but it was nothing to do with that, I just had that concept for the double album. So we went into the studio and I was literally writing the songs at night so that we had something to record in the day. It was terrible. I look back at that period as one of the worst times in my life, although some good songs came out of it, Deliverance being one of them.

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“I remember we actually did Damnation first because that side was still new to me and I was more excited about it. When we came to Deliverance I knew I wanted a title-track, and I had maybe the first riff and the final riff, which has become a bit of a classic in Opeth terms. I was very tired by this point, though. It was a chaotic time with the band in turmoil and I was the only one really working. I don’t know what the fuck the other guys were doing for most of the time; Peter (Lindgren, guitar) left in the middle of recording. When we were getting ready to record the guitars, he left for a party somewhere. I remember sitting in a tiny office with a digital 8-track, writing through the tiredness and just feeling really shitty.”