THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “If you’ve not witnessed Cut storming on stage in the last 25 years, I’m not sure you’ve witnessed rock ’n’ roll in its purest form: An onslaught of concrete punk, garage belters and the necessary dose of sleaze and bravado when the song calls for it.
Two guitars and one drum kit have been their arsenal forever. The low-end/high-end, angular attack is in-yer-face on paper but subtle in execution, confrontational at first but with a heart that looms large, soulful yet fierce. The latest album Dead City Nights is no exception and maybe marks their highest achievement, chock-full as it is with signature bangers and the usual dose of irony. Carlo, Ferruccio and Tony are back it, move out of their way!
Some 16 years ago (OMG!), in a song called Nightride, the band sang ‘The city is our playground at night.’ While writing these 13 songs, the Italian trio saw their city shut down, becoming a ghost town, to quote The Specials. Precisely for this reason, the process of making this album was the lantern they used to navigate through this deadly darkness, so as not to shut down while waiting for the light to return. Unfortunately, everything is still very dark, perhaps even more than before, but at least they made sense of all this nighttime, and now they are ready to share it with all those who want to listen to this album.
Dead City Nights is their seventh album: Unlike its predecessor Second Skin, which saw the participation of many friends and guests, it is a record made solely by the trio, with some intervention by producer Bruno Germano to enrich some of the arrangements. “Even though we loved and still love Second Skin and the sessions that led to its creation, for this album we wanted to go back to the way of working that has always characterized us: The three of us alone, in the rehearsal room, arguing about every single riff and drum groove until we reach a result that satisfied us all,” they say. “After all, the events we were talking about above would not allow us to work differently, even if we wanted to.
“The big difference compared to almost everything else in our discography is that – inevitably — we haven’t been able to break in the songs live, as we usually do before entering the studio. Also for this reason we are waiting for you to show up on the Dead City Nights tour to rediscover these songs in their second life on stage!”
