Quebec’s VORTEX Unveil New Album, The Future Remains In Oblivion
Prepare to be whisked away to a bleak world that is recovering from a devastating cataclysm in the latest album from Canada’s Vortex. The Future Remains In Oblivion is the third concept album from the band which takes great pride in weaving cinematic stories set to orchestral melodic death metal. Scenes of war and survival are punctuated with harrowing strings, technical riffs, and guttural and black metal vocals.
Vortex is comprised of seasoned musicians with an abundance of studio and live experience, and with an offer to join a label, they decided to band together to create music that would have dynamics and a strong melodic side while retaining the essence of what death metal is.
Listen to The Future Remains In Oblivion below and learn more about Vortex via our Five Questions With segment.
Care to introduce yourself to our readers?
My name is Dany Levesque, I’m the founder and guitar player for VORTEX. In 2015, the 5 of us decided to form a band because all our other projects were dead or not going very well. We all had the studio and live experience and soon had the offer to join PRC Music, our late Label. We have played more than 200 shows until now and we are releasing our third album.
Tell us a bit about your most recent release.
The new album is entitled The Future Remains in Oblivion and was released on June 9. The songs are melodic/orchestral but still aggressive and some of them have a black metal influence. Our goal was to create songs that would have a greater impact on our live shows, aggressive songs work well live. We feel the album is a good combination of aggression/melody, and ugliness/beauty.
It is a conceptual album and there is a build-up in intensity and emotion that goes along with the storyline and the lyrics as you go from the first song to the last one.
Some of the songs are riff-oriented and some others had the Orchestra and melodies written before the drums and the guitars. We wrote all the lyrics before the music to make sure that it would fit the feel and emotion of each song/part of the story. When we start writing a song, we know exactly what feeling and emotion we are aiming at, it’s a good way to push ourselves creatively and write thoughtful music.
Where do you tend to pull inspiration from when writing?
We’re all into different genres of death metal and that’s what has shaped our sound. Alex our vocalist is into death core and black metal; Justin our drummer is into orchestral black metal and prog metal bands; Simon our bass player studied jazz guitar in school but comes from the death core scene; Mathieu our guitar player is also schooled in jazz guitar and is into punk rock, old school death metal and tech death. I come from the thrash metal school, but my interest now gravitates toward death and black metal. Most of us are also huge fans of movie scores and this is a major influence on our music.
The Asylum, our first record is more of a traditional death metal album. Lighthouse, our second album has orchestrations and much more melody to it. As the years went by, we were influenced by many bands, but I would say that the ones who really had an impact on us for the writing and the production of our new record The Future Remains in Oblivion were Shadow of Intent, Septicflesh, Lorna Shore, Dimmu, Fleshgod and…. Hans Zimmer.
Our new album and the 2 previous ones are conceptual. First, we find an idea for a good story, it’s got to be related to an interesting matter that we find worth talking about. Second, we write a rough storyline with the chapters that will become individual songs. Third, we write the music and lyrics for each song. Before writing a song, we talk about the feeling that the music must have to fit what is happening in that specific part of our story. Our writing process is diversified, sometimes the orchestra is the backbone of the song and sometimes it’s added once the drums and guitars are all written.
Writing a good story and having to fit the music into it is a good way of pushing our creativity. We like to write music with a specific goal in mind. Our process is not just to find good riffs and put drums over them, it is more about the feeling that each song needs, and we always look at the big picture when writing individual parts.
Do you have any upcoming shows you’d like to tell us about?
For the rest of 2023, we are going to play a lot in Canada with AETERNAM for the second leg of the Symphonic Assault tour and for some other shows with Strigampire who just won the Canadian Wacken Battle of the Bands. Our goal for 2024 is to tour Europe. Watch our social, many shows will be announced soon.
What’s your goal for 2023?
Playing live shows as much as we can, and we also want to finish the writing of our next studio project. Because of the pandemic, it took us four years to put some new material out but this time we want to release something new much quicker in 2024. Another of our goals is to tour Europe in 2024.