This is an amazing and heartbreaking gift for J Church fans. (If you don’t like J Church you’re dead to me.) After Lance passed away, his longtime girlfriend Liberty turned over a box of his four-track tapes to David DiDonato, who played second guitar with the band after Lance relocated to Texas in the early ’00s. He cleaned up and digitized the songs while documenting the process in a lot of detail on his blog (which features some other cool downloads as well, like a Maximillian Colby demo tape).

Above: Lance and David in 2004.

In addition to unfinished songs Lance was working on at the time of his death, there’s a handful of songs from 1996, plus demo versions of songs from The Horror of Life including a bunch of unreleased outtakes, which are characteristically great.

Definitely a bittersweet listen: thrilling to hear, but also reminds you of how much we’ve lost.

For good measure, here’s a piece I wrote on Lance and J Church after his death in 2007.