During a press junket in September 2010 for In Live Concert at the Royal Albert Hall, Mikael Åkerfeldt told Classic Rock magazine that he was finally writing for a new Opeth album.

[6] On 31 January 2011, Opeth entered Atlantis/Metronome Studios in Stockholm to begin recording, with Janne Hansson engineering and Steven Wilson mixing.

By late March, mixing was complete,[7] and in April, Per Wiberg was relieved of his duties in Opeth as part of a mutual decision with the band.

[citation needed] Åkerfeldt has been candid about the decision prompting the band to embrace progressive rock more openly and depart from the sound that Opeth has been pursuing for much of its preceding career: I was a bit discouraged with the contemporary metal scene, and I wanted to break away from it even more.

[16] In a review for AllMusic, Thom Jurek called Heritage the band's most adventurous album, describing the songs as "drenched in instrumental interludes, knotty key and chord changes, shifting time signatures, clean vocals, and a keyboard-heavy instrumentation that includes Mellotrons, Rhodes pianos, and Hammond organs".

After hearing the songs for the first time, Martín Méndez told Åkerfeldt that he would be disappointed if the album continued in that direction.

[17] Relieved that Méndez was not interested in doing another conventional Opeth album, Åkerfeldt scrapped the two songs and started the writing process over.

[1] Dom Lawson of The Guardian praised the band's new direction, saying, "The Swedes' 10th album, Heritage, is a brave, melancholic and often beautiful heavy rock record that revels in the warm, analogue tones and shimmering mellotrons of the pre-punk 70s while still exuding a sense of wonder at new ideas".

magazine wrote, "It's an album that succeeds on its own terms but if it really does mark the effective end of Opeth as a metal band, that will remain our loss".

[24] In a negative review for Drowned in Sound, Patrick Smith wrote, "Åkerfeldt should be praised for breaking free of an often repetitive genre – there's nothing wrong with radical reinvention.

In an interview, Mikael Åkerfeldt recalled a time after a concert when someone tried to fight him for not making death metal music anymore.

[38] In April 2012, the band returned to North America and co-headlined the "Heritage Hunter Tour" with Mastodon, supported by Ghost.