40 Years of Chaos · EP.34 — Rare Tracks

Rare Tracks, released on 12 August 2024 in a limited edition of 150 copies, is not an album. It is an archive.

The disc gathers demos, live versions, covers and unreleased rarities recorded across the band's entire history: from the origins as Hydra between 1991 and 1993, through the first AydrA demos, the tracks that appeared on nineties compilations, the 2013 Hydra reunion, and finally the pandemic-era TribalStep project of 2020. Among the covers, Death and Il Teatro degli Orrori — the latter a trace of Cuore d'Oceano, the metal version AydrA recorded during the 2020 lockdown, which Pierpaolo Capovilla himself reposted on his socials.

What makes it more than a collection is the eight-page colour booklet. Every track has its own line-up and its own story, reconstructed one by one: the Hydra origins of 1991-93, the 1994-95 sessions and the 2013 reunion, the 2011 material and the 2020 pandemic recordings. The audio is remastered throughout.

For a band whose story ran for decades on cassettes, letters and direct contacts, Rare Tracks is the piece that makes the invisible part visible — everything that never fitted onto an album, finally in one place, with the names and the dates attached.