Reaper Entertainment are putting three Edguy albums back into shops on 11 December: Hellfire Club from 2004, Age Of The Joker from 2011 and Space Police (Defenders of the Crown) from 2014, on CD and vinyl. Pre-orders are open.
The choice of three tells you what the label thinks it is selling. Hellfire Club is the one everybody has: Mysteria, King Of Fools, Lavatory Love Machine, orchestras pushed up against power metal without apology, and the record that fixed what this band sounded like. The other two are the arguments.
Age Of The Joker leaned into hard rock and divided the audience that wanted another Hellfire Club. Space Police went further in the same direction. Reissuing all three at once is a label betting that the second two have aged better than their reception suggested, which is usually a safe bet with a band whose jokes were always the point rather than a defect.
Tobias Sammet has spent more of the last decade on Avantasia than on this band, and vinyl pressings of records that never got proper ones are how a catalogue stays alive while that happens.