The album is increasingly sounding like a hodgepodge in general. So if I have the timeline right, there’s the original album (to be titled If Eternity Should Fail) which was a concept album that sprung into a comic book. The Mandrake Project includes some of those songs plus some new ones that are unrelated because “the comic tells the story and the music doesn’t need to be a slave to the concept.” Also material that predates 2014.
Honestly it kinda reminds me of Seventh Son meets Balls to Picasso in terms of how the album came together. One is a concept album where the concept was famously abandoned on several songs and the other is an album that went through several versions before it became what it is. Reading some of these interviews has made me raise an eyebrow or two, but then again I love both Seventh Son and BTP.