The cat is officially out of that damned bag. Our new album ‘Sell The Future’ drops this October. Check out our video for the song ‘Look At You’ directed by DWJ Creative.The album was recorded and mixed at Mad Oak Studios by the one and only Benny Grotto. Mastered at West West Side Music by Alan Douches. Album cover by Timur Khabirov.
You can preorder the vinyl from Ripple Music here:
https://ripplemusic.bigcartel.com/product/cortez-sell-the-future-deluxe-vinyl-editions
European vinyl preorders here:
https://en.ripple.spkr.media/
Digipak CD preorders are available from Salt Of The Earth Records here:
https://saltoftheearthrecords.com/product/586610
Boston heavy rockers Cortez release their new album, Sell the Future, on Oct. 22 through Ripple Music. Preorders are up at the link below, and the long-player — their third — follows three years behind 2017’s The Depths Below (review here), which is the shortest stretch between offerings of the band’s 13-years-so-far career, and all the more so considering the 2018 split with Wasted Theory (review here) that marked their arrival on Ripple. Cortez have never been a full-time, in-the-van-for-weeks kind of band. Most of their shows have been regional to New England or the Eastern Seaboard, and though their first EP, 2007’s Thunder in a Forgotten Town, was put out by Belgium’s Buzzville Records, they are and have always primarily been a Boston band in terms of the traditions they follow in melody and drive and the underlying edge of aggression that has emerged in their material. Or as vocalist Matt Harrington puts it in the opening line of “Vanishing Point,” “Born into a place of cutthroats and of the insane.”
I had the pleasure some months ago of writing the bio for Sell the Future. Not the first I’ve done for Cortez, I think, and hopefully not the last. According to my email dates, I turned in the draft to guitarist Scott O’Dowd on March 15, 2020, at 6:44AM, which might explain the somewhat foreboding tone of the thing as the US was just in the beginning throes of its COVID-19 lockdown. One suspects Sell the Future would have been released sooner than the Fall had that lockdown not taken place, but then, well, blah blah blah. Ultimately what matters is the record itself, which brings together eight Mad Oak-recorded tracks that, beginning right from the outset with “No Escape,” careen along the line between heavy rock and heavy metal, Harrington‘s soulful vocals — he gives the best performance here I’ve ever heard from him — backed by bassist Jay Furlo (plus some gang shouts) as guitarists Scott O’Dowd and Alasdair Swan rip into leads and chunky riffs with a vitality that’s all the more punctuated with the let’s-just-get-this-cowbell-out-of-the-way-now drumming of Alexei Rodriguez. It quickly becomes apparent that Cortez are about to go on a tear, and the 42-minute offering does that and more, be it in speeders like “No Escape,” “Look at You,” Deceivers” and the penultimate “Vanishing Point,” or more mediated pieces like the title-track, “Faulty Authors,” or the seven-minute finale “Beyond.”
read the entire article on The Obelisk.
