Fair warning, this is the most beautiful Christmas album you will hear while simultaneously being sonically disemboweled. There’s a particular kind of person who claims, usually on the internet, usually in all lowercase, that Christmas music is “objectively bad.” This is the same person who listens to symphonic melodeath while decorating a gingerbread house. This is also, statistically speaking, a person who is correct. Because if you think about it long enough (dangerous), you realize that metal, especially the kind of grand, frostbitten, orchestral metal practiced by Atavistia, is already Christmas music. It’s just Christmas music for people who think “Silent Night” would be improved with war drums and a guitar solo that sounds like an avalanche hitting a cathedral.

Enter The Winter Way Reforged, a reimagining, re-recording, re-sculpting, and spiritually decaffeinated reanimation of their 2020 album. If the original was a snowstorm, the reforged version is the same storm after gaining five years of wisdom, emotional damage, and higher-end studio equipment. The album drops December 12th on Blood Blast Distribution.

Atavistia mastermind Mattias Sippola didn’t just remaster this thing. He rebuilt it the way people who hate Christmas rebuild their childhood memories, bigger, colder, more dramatic, and undeniably more meaningful. The Winter Way Reforged is one of the most genuinely beautiful winter albums ever produced, while also sounding like elves unionizing against Santa and burning the North Pole to the ground.

The three songs I chose to ugly cry over and encourage on vinyl are: 

Track 2. The Atavistic Forest (Reforged): This is the first of the two tracks cleared for radio/podcasts, which feels delightfully mischievous because this song is not “radio-friendly” in any universe that plays Michael Bublé without irony.

The band reworked this thing more than most people rework their holiday boundaries. It blasts in like Krampus with a gym membership, but the lyrics, tightened, clarified, and sharpened, give it the narrative gravity of a Tolkien winter myth where everyone is cold, everyone is doomed, and everyone still looks oddly majestic. This is, effectively, the “O Come, All Ye Faithful” of melodeath.

Track 4. Eternal Oceans (Reforged): This is the winter ballad for people who blame the Ocean for their trauma.  This track slows everything down and drops the tuning low enough that if Mariah Carey sang over it, she’d summon a Scandinavian sea deity. Thematically, it’s a cosmic winter sea, less Nativity, more Nativ-sea-ty, and the fully overhauled orchestration makes it feel like the musical equivalent of standing on a frozen shoreline trying to remember what sunlight felt like 14 months ago.

Track 7. The Winter Way (Reforged): Clean vocals. Bleak atmosphere. A cold, eternal slumber vibe that somehow still feels comforting—like discovering that the true meaning of Christmas was never presents or family, but rather the creeping, bone-deep chill of cosmic insignificance. This is the closer that makes you think: “Yeah. Maybe metal really IS Christmas music.” 

And it is because Christmas is about ritual. Atmosphere. Grandiosity. The contrast between darkness and light. The way winter transforms the world into something harsher, quieter, and more honest. Metal just… tells the truth about it.

Order the new Atavistia album,  The Winter Way Reforged, at this location.

Jordeana Bell

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