It felt like the air was sucked out of the entire rock scene the minute that Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington passed away. While the genre was by no means dead, Bennington was one of the people continuing to push it forward in the mainstream, and even if people weren’t responding to the new record, that didn’t mean he had to give his life, either. While many have been looking at what the band have been doing in the meantime with Emily Armstrong, ‘Lost’ was one of the few demos from around that time that should have never been kept in the vault.

Since many fans were picking up the next anniversary editions of Meteora, ‘Lost’ was one of the few songs that never got properly fleshed out. But considering Bennington’s vocal performance, anyone would swear that he was singing this as an album take, having the same kind of guttural shout that he had when singing ‘Lying From You’ and managing to sprinkle in some of the cleaner vocals that actually sound like they were hinting at what he would be doing on ballads like ‘Numb’.

Even though a lot of what Bennington did has been thrown out into the world at this point, it would be much more interesting to put together an entire record of his unreleased material. They can do whatever they want with their new material, but if this is what Mike Shinoda has in the vault, it might be worth getting a peek behind the curtain and seeing what magic has been left over.

‘Temptation’ – Metallica

Not many metalheads really have too much of an urge to revisit St Anger by Metallica. The album has quite rightly turned into a massive meme these days, given how many times people bring up the snare sound and the awful mixing, but there were at least some good ideas sprinkled throughout the mix that many people overthink. And while many things couldn’t get fleshed out for practical reasons, the idea to abandon ‘Temptation’ was probably a major mistake on their part.

Because, while listening to the whole album, Metallica sounds like they are trying to ride the nu-metal train for all it’s worth, and hearing this droning piece of music from James Hetfield is the closest thing to something original on the record. While ‘The Unnamed Feeling’ was a better way of letting out the band’s emotion, Hetfield always held this one in high regard until it was axed by the rest of the group, along with an echo chamber section that could have opened up the record. 

The finished product may have needed more than a few rewrites, but given what he had been building to on tracks like ‘Bleeding Me’ and ‘Fixxxer’, ‘Temptation’ could have served as the tortured trilogy in the same way that ‘The Unforgiven’ trilogy was in their catalogue. Those were the digestible stories, but each song in this aborted trilogy doesn’t leave anything to the imagination.

‘Robot Rock (Remix)’ – Daft Punk

So, before you go back up and read the title of this article, here’s a quick catch-up. Even some Daft Punk fans know about how Human After All is a slight step down from their usual output, but since the duo never made a bad album in their lives, it’s still got some quality material across the entire project. While ‘Robot Rock’ is a genuine highlight that sees them bringing in some electric guitars, the real tragedy is the person who was supposed to be on the final mix but didn’t make the cut.

Even though the tune works perfectly on its own, the initial plan was to have George Michael appear on the final version. Since Michael had been one of the biggest stars of the day and was in the process of recording, this could have been a case of him trying to put a bit more edge into his sound much in the same way Michael Jackson did, but he elected to work on his own dance record, Patience.

There are some tunes like ‘Freeek’ that seem to capture what Michael was going for with Daft Punk, but hearing his soaring voice on their version would have been a great way to prepare people for what would happen on Random Access Memories. Because with all due respect to the genius of Pharrell Williams, hearing Michael try his hand at going robotic before ‘Get Lucky’ happened would be a match made in heaven.

‘Pure and Easy’ – The Who

The premise behind The Who’s Lifehouse has always been slightly difficult to follow. There are pieces that Pete Townshend had that could have made for an interesting concept, but since there was no narrative throughline, the only possible way to make everything fit was to have it all broken up into pieces when they eventually released Who’s Next. Even if the content was salvageable, the album’s mission statement should have survived to the final product.

Although ‘Pure and Easy’ eventually saw a release as a rarity on certain releases of Who’s Next, it does a much better job at setting the scene for what the album would be. The whole premise was about finding the meaning of life through music, and when hearing Townshend sing the song by himself, we get a lot more insight into what the tune means to him, almost like he’s on the verge when talking about the importance of having a companion in his guitar.

Even with the version of the album that we eventually got, it would be much easier to swap out a song like ‘Love Ain’t For Keeping’ for this, if anything to give a thematic element to the album since the melody comes back on ‘The Song Is Over’. ‘Baba O’Riley’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ are the true war cries, but if they wanted to salvage the record, they should have gone with the first instance of Townshend singing his song to the wide open spaces.

‘Suicide’ – Paul McCartney

A lot of what Paul McCartney released on his self-titled debut was nothing more than demos. As much as he liked the idea of putting an end to The Beatles’ drama, the only thing that most people took note of on first listen was ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’, with the rest of the record sounding decidedly dishevelled compared to everything else. But in between the experimental songs is the beginning of a track that McCartney never got to finish.

Entitled ‘Suicide’, this slight snippet of a tune was the kind of record that Macca always envisioned giving to Frank Sinatra. While the short piece does evoke a lot of musical weight and drama, like a lot of Sinatra’s show-stopping tunes, there’s a good chance that his record label would have never let him off the hook with that song title, eventually discarding McCartney’s tune without even thinking about it.

But given how much he loves digging up pieces of lore, chances are McCartney could revisit the tune later down the line. We have the basic tracks on special editions of McCartney, but if Macca found the love in his heart to revisit a track like ‘Now and Then’, maybe he could give this track another shot.

‘Angel Child’ – Oasis

Looking back on the colossal flameout records in rock history, there’s a pretty significant crater for Oasis’ Be Here Now. Even though the album is far from terrible from back to front, the incessant length coupled with the fact that the songs aren’t very good does leave a lot to be desired for people who thought that Oasis were going to take over the world all over again. But if the album itself was a chore to sit through in many respects, the B-sides from the era tell a much different story.

While many of Oasis’s B-sides have gone down in lore as essential listening, ‘Angel Child’ is one of the few that never made it past the demo stage. Given the fact that the band were full steam ahead throughout most of this period, hearing something this sparse is a breath of fresh air, especially considering the rest of the ‘D’You Know What I Mean’ was cluttered with some of the noisiest songs in their repertoire.

Considering ‘Stand By Me’ also had ballads like ‘Going Nowhere’, ‘Angel Demo’ is a song that deserves the same kind of treatment, especially in the breakdown section where Noel Gallagher’s acoustic bridge is begging to be replaced by some sort of string section playing the same line. It’s hard to get too worked about in this stage, but like all great Be Here Now tunes, ‘Angel Demo’ reeks of lost potential.

‘Between Us Two’ – Van Halen

The Van Halen of the late 1990s is enough to make any hard rock fan feel sad inside. The fallout between the band and Sammy Hagar was never going to end well, and despite trying to get something together with David Lee Roth, hearing him and Eddie sling one-liners at each other in the press was the equivalent of watching two parents fight with each other. Hagar may have been perfectly content with walking away, but that left one song on the table unfinished.

Since the band was working with Glen Ballard to create the material that would appear on Twister, ‘Between Us Two’ was one of the few songs that got lost in the shuffle. While Eddie had said that the band laid down the official demos for the tune and even had the beginnings of a Hagar vocal melody, it ended up sitting on the shelf before eventually being relegated to his vaults in his later years.

Out of all the songs on this list, there’s more hope now than ever that something might come to pass with the tune. Alex Van Halen had already talked about having a lot of Eddie’s greatest tunes lying around for something in the future, so even if ‘The Red Rocker’ isn’t singing them, there’s a chance that those magical fingers that birthed a legion of guitarists could be heard from again.

‘Cigarettes and Valentines’ – Green Day

The entire story behind Green Day cutting Cigarettes and Valentines makes it sound like the Ark of the Covenant of pop-punk. The band had everything ready to go before beginning work on American Idiot, but when the record was stolen right from under their noses, they figured they would do the next best thing and make something that sounded even stronger. And despite Billie Joe Armstrong saying that that album would most likely never be released, the title track showed the potential of the return to form they had on their hands.

Everyone is most likely glad to have the political rock opera that they were eventually given, but Green Day’s performance of the tune on their live album Awesome as Fuck proved that they hadn’t lost a step. The entire premise behind their original idea was to return to the sounds of Dookie, and this felt like the more hard-edged version of the group that was ready to kick some asses all over again, down to the chaotic solo in the middle of the tune.

Armstrong has claimed that a lot of the ideas from the album have been recycled in other songs at this point, but if they did decide to make another special edition of American Idiot later down the line, including the demos of what would have been Cigarettes and Valentines would be a treasure trove if they sounded anywhere close to this. It would have been far from their best, but definitely worth any fan’s time.

‘Carnival of Light’ – The Beatles

There aren’t too many stones unturned in The Beatles’ world at this point. From the countless documentaries that have been made about them to Anthology counting up every single take that they have been sitting in the vaults at Abbey Road Studios, the Fab Four have reached the point where they could potentially be overexplained in many respects. But there is always that strange curiosity that piques every fan’s interest when the name ‘Carnival of Light’ is brought up.

Then again, it’s hard to think those same fans would be excited to hear the band’s avant-garde piece. Since everyone agreed for a while that ‘Revolution 9’ was one of the worst parts of The White Album, this was the same thought process taken to the nth degree, going on for minutes on end with nothing but random noises in the same vein as what they were doing on ‘I Am the Walrus’.

Every one of the band’s avant-garde pieces tended to have a few blemishes in the mix, but hearing them work together on one of them could have been the one saving grace behind all of their experiments. After all, people haven’t exactly had fond memories of Two Virgins or Electronic Sound, so perhaps getting all of their contributions together on one track could have made for an engaging listening experience.

‘Sappy’ – Nirvana

Nirvana never apologised once for their beliefs. They were never willing to go along with the program like the hair metal bands before them, and they would have been proud to spit in the face of anyone who was disrespecting someone. So, how is it that one of their greatest feminist pieces became relegated to different box sets before getting officially released?

Despite lingering around in the background for a long time, Kurt Cobain never felt that ‘Sappy’ was recorded the right way when he began work on Nevermind and In Utero. If you take into account what he’s talking about here, though, this is one of the darkest looks at toxic masculinity that anyone will ever hear, with the narrator talking about a woman who has become subservient to her husband and forced to spend her entire life in a laundry room doing whatever he says.

While we did eventually get a song that got everyone’s approval following Cobain’s death, this would have hit like a sledgehammer if it were given the proper time of day on In Utero. That album was already abrasive enough as it was, but whereas ‘Polly’ was the soft-spoken look at what women have to do with day after day, this could have been the flipside that showed the domestic side of torture.