I'm sure these guys are going to rest for a while after touring, and then Mike's going to dive into whatever project interests him the most. From a lot of the things I've read, it seems like he's got a whole list of things he'd like to do with different people, including Steven Wilson. So with all of that in mind, it may be quite some time before we hear a new opeth album.
As far as that album goes, (if they decide to do another one), I hope it isn't as rushed a process as deliverance/damnation seemed to have been. I doubt they spent as much time as they would've liked on these releases and the whole recording process sounded like a nightmare from the interviews and from the studio diary thing on their website I read.
All in all, I'd just hope for something with a real grand, epic feel to it, with beautiful acoustic interludes in the right places and brutal death metal passages to liven things up throughout. As far as anything specific, I'd like to see the guitars have a more layered, fatter sound like in Blackwater Park, and I'd like the riffing to be along the lines of what I've always loved about opeth, brutal and grooving, yet delicate and unwinding, all at the same time. I wasn't as fond of the more brutal, stripped down, straight-forward death metal approach in some songs of Deliverance.
Also, something I really liked about past albums that I didn't notice as much on Deliverance was the whole grand, majestic kind of vibe, if you know what I mean. Like the song The Moor, When, The Leper Affinity, Blackwater Park... whether you like them all or not, they all have this powerful, epic feel to them that I just didn't feel as much on Deliverance. The album as a whole didn't feel quite as powerful or seem to flow as well from song to song, largely due to the absence of that kind of feeling, and it seemed more grey and lifeless I guess I'd say, when compared to previous albums.
Now I don't fault them for doing something different and it is still good music; it just wasn't quite what I was looking for. Some songs did have parts that that blew me away, like the second half of Master's Apprentices, the end of Deliverance, and about 2/3 of A Fair Judgement, but it needed more of those passages, the ones that make you feel like you're on some great musical journey, to really grab me for the whole duration of the album.
