SIGH has shared a music video for "Unputenpu," a new single from the band's upcoming album "Goh-ka" featuring a guest guitar solo from OPETH's Mikael Åkerfeldt.
"I've completed my own Japanese style on 'Unputenpu'. The guitar lead by Mikael Åkerfeldt definitely gives another boost to the song," said mainman Mirai Kawashima, describing a track built around the idea that fortune and misfortune are ultimately governed by fate rather than human control — a theme that runs through much of "Goh-ka" as a whole.
The album's title carries triple significance in SIGH's telling: the infernal fire that punishes sinners, the apocalyptic fire that consumes the world, and the concept of karma. That framing extends to the record's visual and lyrical concept, which draws on "Kuso-zu" — a series of Buddhist paintings depicting nine stages of bodily decomposition, used traditionally to meditate on life's impermanence. "Goh-ka" runs roughly an hour, one of the longer entries in SIGH's famously genre-scrambling catalog.
The video for "Unputenpu" comes from director Costin Chioreanu, a frequent collaborator with extreme metal bands whose visual style tends toward the same unsettling, ritualistic imagery SIGH's music trades in.
Founded in Tokyo in 1990, SIGH has spent more than three decades refusing to stay still stylistically, folding jazz, prog, symphonic and traditional Japanese elements into a black metal foundation across albums like "Hail Horror Hail" and "Graveward." Åkerfeldt's appearance on "Unputenpu" continues a long history of high-profile collaborators passing through the band's orbit, and adds another data point to OPETH's own reputation for turning up in unexpected corners of the extreme metal underground.