You're welcome, glad it is working for you

Please remember to first open a discussion on similar scripting issues on https://community.metabrainz.org/c/picard/ . Not because I want to be annoying, I'm happy to answer here, but it usually works out better for everyone. More people are active there and your are much more likely to receive an answer timely. As a communication platform it is also more convenient to use.

If it turns out to be a bug or something that needs to be addressed in Picard itself we can always create a ticket separately.

Thank you so much Philipp, that did the trick! Cheers!

Yeah, from both the bandcamp and metal archives and from listening to it this seems to be a collaboration. If you wanted to you could even distinguish the case where it is a collaboration of multiple artists performing together but not a typical Various Artists album with different songs by different artists. E.g. you could have this:

$if($gt($lenmulti(%_albumartists%),1),$if(%_multiartist%,Various Artists,Collaborations)/)

This would check if there is more than one artist involved. If it then is also considered multiartist (different tracks performed by different artists) it is put into "Various Artists", otherwise it is assumed to be a collaboration and put into a "Collaborations" folder.

Another interesting thing to check on stuff like this is whether the release has the type compilation or not (with "$inmulti(%releasetype%,compilation)"). A release with %_multiartist% and marked as compilation is usually the typical various artists compilation, while a type of album is probably rather a collaboration or a release by a single artist / band with some guests.

That album does not have %_multiartist% set because all individual tracks are credited to the same artists. This looks more like a collaboration, I personally would not classify two artists collaborating as a Various Artists release. It could also be that the release on MB is actually wrong, and some tracks are by Dragged Into Sunlight while others are by Gnaw Their Tongues . In that case that release should be corrected and the individual tracks credited accordingly.

Anyway, if you want to put everything under "Various Artists" as soon as more than one artist is involved you can replace "%_multiartist%" with "$gt($lenmulti(%_albumartists%),1)".

Thanks for the swift reply, Philipp. The first line was indeed me clumsily trying to fix the problem. Now if I understand correctly, using this code:

$if(%_multiartist%,Various Artists/,$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)/)
$if(%albumartist%, \($if2(%originalyear%,%year%)\) %album%/,)
$if($gt(%totaldiscs%,1),%discnumber%-,)$if($and(%albumartist%,%tracknumber%),$num(%tracknumber%,2) ,)$if(%_multiartist%,%artist% - ,)%title%

should do what I want. However, testing on this release Picard places the files in a folder called Dragged Into Sunlight _ Gnaw Their Tongues, as if there were an album artist called Dragged Into Sunlight / Gnaw Their Tongues (this is the actual album artist field) and the %_multiartist% field were false. The same thing happens with all my split release albums.

Two issues are possible:

1. You have that strange line
$if($gt(%artists%,1),Various,)
That would prefix the artist folder name with "Various" if %artists% is alphabetically larger than "1", which probably is the case most of the time. I guess this was supposed to check for more than one artist. Use either "$if($gt($lenmulti(%artists%),1),...)" for that or probably even better ""$if(%_multiartist%,...)". Actually I think you don't want that very first line of your script at all.

2. The part where the script actually creates an artist folder is "$if2(%albumartist%,%artist%)/". This will create a folder based  on either the albumartist or artist tag. Make sure those tags are set for your files.

The files you are saving, are they matched against MusicBrainz releases or do you save unmatched files? What tags are in those files?

In general scripting questions like this are much better discussed at the community forums at https://community.metabrainz.org/c/picard/