With the band’s annual Dia de los Deftones festival in San Diego having already been curated for another successful year, fans of the alt-metal legends have certainly been clamoring for a new track from the band, who haven’t released a record since 2016’s Gore. All good things take time, of course, and for Deftones, that’s really no exception considering their quality over the years. Now, it seems we have a little more of a definitive timeline for when their 9th full-length might be released.
In a new interview with NBC7 San Diego a few days before their annual festival, Chino Moreno had plenty to say about what the new record – and his trademark vocals – might sound like:
“We’ve been working on our record for about a year now. We’re not doing that thing where we go in and lock ourselves in a room until it’s done; we are kind of enjoying our time making it. It’s been a cool process, we get together, we work for a couple weeks, whether that’s just making noise and coming up with ideas and then everybody just goes home and comes back to work on ’em a little bit more. So, we’ve been doing that for a little over a year or so. This summer, we actually went into the studio and recorded an album’s worth of music. So, the music was pretty much done and the last few months have sort of just been working on the lyrics and the melodies and the singing parts. So that’s pretty much where we’re at right now.”
“It’ll definitely be out next year,” Moreno said. “I’m hoping that it’ll be earlier on in the year, but I feel like once I give a definitive answer or speculate exactly when, I feel like we’ll be held to it [laughs] so I kind of want to continue on. Of course, it’ll be out next year, hopefully earlier than later. Our biggest thing is making sure that it’s good. We’ll be performing it, once it’s out, for the next two or three years, so we want to be sure it’s the best it can be and want to make everyone happy — including ourselves.”
He also had much to say about how the band’s annual festival landed in San Diego, instead of the band’s native Northern California:
“I don’t really actually have a definitive answer for that,” he said. “It was brought up last year, like ‘What do you think about doing it there?’ So, we went down maybe six months before the actual festival and looked at the space and the people there were super nice and to get support from the Padres and Live Nation, who we’ve partnered with on the festival, it was just a super cool vibe down there … They took us on the field and gave us jerseys and everything with our names on ’em and it was awesome.”
Needless to say, fans should be stoked. While Deftones didn’t unveil necessarily new music over the weekend, they did perform the live debut of their song “Smile”, which should give hope that their Eros record might see a release as well. Here’s hoping.
