Listen to “Never Forever,” a Rare, Unreleased Steve Vai Track

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Steve Vai’s landmark album Passion and Warfare, Sony will be releasing a special reissue version of the disc on June 24th. That’s all well and great for Vai collectors, but then there’s this: the reissue will come with an entire bonus album, Modern Primitive, containing previously unreleased tracks recorded between his 1984 debut, Flex-Able, and 1990, when Passion and Warfare came out. (It’s actually been 26 years since the latter… but I guess that’s close enough in record label math).

What does the lost album Modern Primitive sound like? According to Vai himself in an interview with Metallus.it, really fucking weird:

I’m [including] an extra CD with material that’s never been released. It’s music the I’ve either recorded or written in between Flex-Able and Passion and Warfare. If you’re familiar with Flex-Able, it’s a very strange record: I recorded it when I was 20. And if you listen to Passion and Warfare, it seems [like] a completely different guy. So what happened in between? Where’s the missing link?

One listen to the song “Never Forever” backs up that claim. I’m not intimately familiar with Vai’s body of work so I can’t comment on the “missing link” element, but the track is certainly strange, and very different from the Steve Vai material that I — and likely you — are most familiar with. Though Vai had a number of vocal contributors over the years (including perennial MS favorite Devin Townsend), I can’t ever recall hearing anything quite like this before and I’m having a difficult time tracking down who sings on this one. The track is incredibly chilled out, almost like a lounge jazz tune as opposed to the high-flying guitar histrionics you’d expect from Vai, but it’s still got his unmistakeable imprints all over it, particularly in the extended jam section at the end.

Check it out via Loudwire below. Modern Primitive / Passion and Warefare comes out on June 24th and can be pre-ordered here.