Founded in Vancouver, Canada, in 2017, Atavistia is rewriting the playbook. Mattias Sippola wears many hats in the group: guitarist, vocalist, composer, and producer. He creates music he’s inspired by, but boils it down to a revival of sound. The latest offering was created in a burst of inspiration over less than a six-month period. It’s just what Sappola does.

“Any music I’m a part of, I’ll just get these big bursts, and I’ll end up writing a ridiculous amount of music, and then I’ll go a long time without doing it at all. Then it just flip-flops. Right now, I haven’t written anything for Atavistia in over a year, but there’s four albums of material coming up.”

Their newest album, Old Gods Awaken, is out now, via Blood Blast Distribution. Just five days after release, Sippola admitted that the response was a lot better than he had thought it would be. He says he’s a pretty pessimistic person, so the initial expectation was a flop, but everything has been a pleasant surprise. Even after a decade, it’s sometimes tough to get out of that mindset.

“I’ve murdered my ego with every weapon you can think of. Starting out, and it’s clear as day, with One With the Sun (2017), I can’t even listen to it because I know exactly where my mind was at the time. I’ve gotten older, though. I wrote that when I was 19. I’m 30 now.” 

The first song Sippola wrote for this project was the title track, and he had an epiphany, noting this album should consist of shorter songs, with one long one, instead of the ridiculously long songs they are known for. “Old Gods Awaken” comes in at just over 11 minutes and rounds out the record; a perfect stamp of triumph. There are some challenges in creating an epic like that.

“Make sure that it hits the whole time,” advises Sippola. “With longer songs, there’s a lot more room to breathe. You already know the audience that you’re writing for, essentially. I write music for myself first, but I also have to think of the audience as well. If I stayed writing only long songs, that would just make the niche even smaller and smaller. The challenge is getting hookable song formats that you know you can remember the verse and the chorus, and it all hits hard one after the other.”

This record is actually the first half of a soft, two-album concept, showcasing more light and triumph, while the next offering is going to be the Yin to the Yang. The story isn’t going to be followed, necessarily, but more of the same idea, but darker. Sippola is hoping to start rolling out all that next year. For now, though, Atavistia can look back on the last 10 years and be proud to say they are still here and aren’t going anywhere.

“I’ve always treated the first decade of anything as the discovering and finding who you are as an artist, as cliché and cheesy as that sounds. It’s a really long game; it’s not like pop music, where you get discovered because you have a look or something and then you’re hot in the scene for a year or two, and then fade into obscurity. Metal music is not like that, and especially in a small niche like this, it takes forever to get to a place of sustainability.”