Atavistia have released Beneath The Elder Stone, a song written in 2022 for Old Gods Awaken and then left off it. It arrives now on the deluxe edition of that album, through Blood Blast Distribution.
Mattias Sippola, who founded the band, is blunt about what happened to it. The song went through drastic changes and is almost completely rewritten, with very little of the 2022 version surviving, and he says the finished thing is close to unrecognisable next to what existed during the original sessions.
That is a more interesting admission than most bonus tracks get. A song cut from an album usually reappears unchanged, as a curiosity for people who bought the record twice. This one was cut because it did not work, then rebuilt until it did, which makes the four year delay the reason it exists rather than an accident of scheduling.
Five albums in, the band works the symphonic end of melodic death metal out of Vancouver, where orchestration tends to decide whether a song survives the arrangement. Sippola says the wait helped. On this evidence it did.