Opeth / Katatonia - "From Stockholm With Love" - The Bomb Factory - Dallas, TX - February 14th 2026 Written and Photographed by Jeremiah Wehler
Prog metal giants Opeth brought a two-hour-long Valentine's Day gift to Dallas for the second leg of "The Last Will and Testament North American Tour", including another great Stockholm-based band: Katatonia!
While Opeth last played Dallas at The Majestic Theatre in October 2024, there was still a strong turnout at The Bomb Factory last night. The Majestic is a fully-seated classic venue that lends itself better to stand-up comedy than heavy metal, so with all of the floor space at The Bomb Factory, fans were eager to get a little rowdy. In fact, lead vocalist / guitarist / primary songwriter Mikael Åkerfeldt told them to "go crazy to the heavier songs", and they happily obliged with an active circle pit for the majority of the performance.
Having been out on the road for almost all of 2025, the band was in mid-season form. The sound mix was flawless, with no strain needed to hear the separation between Fredrik Åkesson and Åkerfeldt's crunchy guitars, Martin Lopez's five-string bass, Joakim Svalberg's Mellotron (plus bongos on "The Grand Conjuration"!), and Waltteri Väyrynen's precise drumming. Åkerfeldt's between-song banter was equally on point, making jokes about everything from his love for Lynyrd Skynyrd and the 80s TV show Dallas, to Gothenburg being known by Stockholm-dwellers as 'the anus of Sweden'.
The light show was entertaining without being too distracting: Twelve large LED screens were placed on the stage and above, working in tandem with the giant rear screen of the venue to show different backdrops relevant to each song from the setlist. And what a setlist it was! Three tracks from their latest (The Last Will and Testament), heavy classics reaching back from My Arms Your Hearse to Ghost Reveries, and even an acoustic track from Damnation. For my sixth time seeing them live, this might be their best (and most varied) setlist I've experienced yet. While the past few Opeth albums aren't as heavy as their earlier works, they seem to have found the sweet spot between old and new for this tour.
Openers Katatonia had a similarly great sound mix, and vocalist Jonas Renkse sounded just as incredibly silky as ever. His voice is a one-of-a-kind in the metal space, never once veering towards a scream or growl, even when the rest of the band turns up the pace and distortion. Lighter vocals or not, the crowd was very much into them, and I noticed quite a few Katatonia shirts in the crowd.
Their light show fit the moods of their album artworks and their darker lyrical content: Bright at times, but always behind the band members, silhouetting them for the vast majority of their 45-minute set. They ripped through songs from almost every album from The Great Cold Distance to two tracks from their newest, 2025's Nightmares as Extensions of the Waking State. While Renkse is the only remaining original member of Katatonia, the other four members seem to gel well together, and they sounded just as good as the first time I saw them in 2012 (co-headlining at Trees with the Devin Townsend Project).
This tour will be wrapping up on February 25th in Vancouver, and if they're coming near you between now and then, make it a priority to witness The Last Will and Testament Part 2!
Jeremiah Wehler for Heavy Havoc
