My Arms, Your Hearse

My Arms, Your Hearse (often abbreviated to MAYH) is Opeth’s third album, released in 1998. This album marks a large stylistic change from their previous release, Morningrise, especially production-wise. All of the songs are shorter than ten minutes, in stark contrast to their prior albums on which most songs exceed this. The album features a heavier overall sound, cleaner production and fewer mellow acoustic parts (although, the album contains three instrumental tracks, “Prologue”, “Madrigal”, and “Epilogue” and one mellow track, “Credence” which is devoid of death metal vocals). This was also Opeth’s first concept album.

This was Opeth’s first album not to feature bassist Johan DeFarfalla and drummer Anders Nordin, who were both on the two previous records. Opeth brought in Martin Mendez, a friend and previous bandmate of drummer Martin Lopez, to replace him. However, he did not have enough time to learn the bass parts for the album, so Mikael Åkerfeldt played bass on the album.

Perhaps to enhance the flow of the album, the last word(s) of each song on the album is the name of the following, with the album’s final track, “Epilogue”, leading back to “Prologue” to complete the cycle. Since the album has three instrumental tracks, lyrics are included in the jacket to be read during those parts, fulfilling the naming convention. In some cases, the silent lyrics move the plot along, and in others only serve to comment in a passive fashion.

My Arms, Your Hearse was Opeth’s first album to be simultaneously released in Europe, on the Candlelight Records label, and the United States, on Century Black, Century Media Records’ black metal off-shoot label.