Opeth’s Martin Mendez Announces New Band, White Stones

Opeth bassist Martin Mendez has announced that he has a new band called White Stones, and that band will be unleashing a new album called Kuarahy in 2020. The death metal project is signed to Nuclear Blast Records, who call it “the perfect band for you when you are into old Opeth and Morbid Angel.” However, Mendez says the band is on a different wavelength.

“I’ve always written music at home but never had the confidence to do anything like this. I never wrote a song, never presented something I wrote for Mikael [Åkerfeldt, OPETH singer/songwriter]. I didn’t have any direction, I came up with the first song for fun,” Mendez explains. “White Stones has nothing to do with Opeth; I see no relation between the two. I played ‘Kuarahy’ to Mikael a few months ago. He really liked it and was happy for me.”

Mendez, who wrote the music during his downtime after Opeth’s Sorceress tour, named the album after his birthplace in Uruguay. While Opeth is based in Sweden, the bassist stays connected to his roots. “I feel strongly connected to Uruguay still,” he says. “I wanted to write music related to that — the sun on the Uruguayan flag I transformed into the White Stones logo; there are a lot of small things that connect the record to that place. Kuarahy is the native Uruguayan people’s word for ‘Sun.'”

Kuarahy will be released March 20th, 2020. No audio samples have been released yet, but stay tuned for more details.