At the turn of the century,尼尔年轻convened his longtime band Crazy Horse in a San Francisco studio calledToastto record an album of emotionally wrenching, candid songs about his troubled relationship with his then-wife, Pegi. Then he promptly shelved it.

After weeks of intense recording sessions, the band took a break from recording to fulfill a couple of South American tour dates, and upon its return to the studio on Mission Street, Young decided to pull the plug on the project.

Some 22 years later, Young is ready to revisit the material on “Toast,” which he recorded in 2001. The reason for the delay? Young said he needed a little emotional distance because it was “so sad that I couldn’t put it out. … I couldn’t handle it at that time.”

Young released the second track from the album, “Timberline,” on Friday, July 1, a week ahead of the full album’s release. The follow-up to the all-out rocker “Standing in the Light of Love” is about a lumberjack going through an existential crisis.

“The scene changes to a religious guy who just lost his job. He’s turning on Jesus. He can’t cut any more trees. He’s a logger,” Young said on hiswebsite.

“Timberline” is one of three songs on the seven-track album that have never been released, as the others were repurposed and rerecorded for subsequent releases.

Young first made fans aware of the lost recording sessions in a 2008 interview with Rolling Stone,and then wrote about the album in depth last year in his virtual daily newspaper,the Times Contrarian.

“The music of ‘Toast’ is about a relationship,” he said. “There is a time in many relationships that go bad, a time long before the breakup, where it dawns on one of the people, maybe both, that it’s over. This was that time.”

Describing the sound of songs like “Quit” and “Boom Boom Boom,” Young added that the material is “murky and dark.”

“But not in a bad way,” he said. “Fat. From the first note, you can feel the sadness that permeates the recording.”

But even before “Toast” arrives, Young has moved on. This week he announced plans to release a live album by his other band, Promise of the Real, documenting its 2019 European tour. That album will be called “Noise & Flowers.”

尼尔年轻and Crazy Horse’s ‘Toast’ track list

1. “Quit”
2. “Standing in the Light of Love”
3. “Goin’ Home”
4. “Timberline”
5. “Gateway of Love”
6. “How Ya Doin’?”
7. “Boom Boom Boom”