DEFTONES Have finished all the music for their next studio album
Yesterday (Friday, April 12), DEFTONES frontman Chino Moreno spoke to the KROQ radio station backstage at Coachella and discussed the status of the follow-up to 2020’s “Ohms” album. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): ”We haven’t really talked much [publicly] about it. We’ve just sort of been working on and off over the last year and a half from when we started writing to… Basically, where we’re sitting right now is we have a whole record recorded all musically. And it’s pretty much my job right now to finish up the vocals.
“And I have, obviously, this show again next week, and then straight after that, I go back home to Oregon and I go in the studio. So as long as that takes… I hate to put a definite kind of timeframe, ’cause we’re not really in a rush. We want it to be great. I think that’s most important. But it is coming, and, yeah, it’s really good. We’re really excited with what we’ve been working on. And everybody’s jazzed.”
Discussing the direction the new DEFTONES music takes, Chino said: “I feel like, overall, it’s an invigorated kind of sound. We went in and everybody… It’s, like, after all these years, you go in, and it’s, like, we hadn’t written a record since — what was it? Pre-COVID, I think, when we were last in the studio. So it’d been a while since we’d actually… I mean, we’ve been playing shows, but we hadn’t really got into being creative.
“The creative part, to me, is always kind of the funnest part of being in this band. Performing is great, but coming up with something out of nothing, that feeling cannot be topped. And so when you get in the room with your friends, we’re laughing, we’re having fun and then someone does something and then I react to it or they react to what I’m doing, it goes in a circle and then, all of a sudden, we lift our heads up and there’s something that exists that didn’t exist before we walked in that room. That’s just great.”
Amidst a conversation on Gnostic Academy published in July of last year, guitarist Stephen Carpenter also provided an update on the forthcoming record.
Carpenter revealed that they are once again collaborating with producer Nick Raskulinecz, known for his work with bands like ALICE IN CHAINS and MASTODON, for this upcoming album. Carpenter said: “In the last couple months, really two or three months, we… well maybe a little longer now, really… February is when we started. We starting to work on new material for a new record.
“It’s going good. It’s a little slow at first, but it always is. Dragging our feet ain’t nothing new. But we’ve got the stuff up and going now, and yeah. We’re on a good little momentum at the moment and we hope to have it all done and out by next spring or summer. I mean, there’s no official date yet but that’s our goal.”
He also added: “Everything stems from us just jamming out some ideas, messing around. Someone comes up with something that maybe someone else or everyone else likes, and then we focus in on that for a little bit. That’s what Nick‘s great at doing, too. He’s good at… well we could just sit and jam aimlessly and plow through idea after idea without even stopping to recognize ’em.
“He’s great at saying ‘that idea is really cool. Let’s try that. Let’s try to work on that for a minute, and then that other idea might be really cool with that one. Let’s try putting them together’ and stuff like that. So that’s what’s awesome about him. He’s like a an unofficial band member at that point. He’s good at giving us direction where we don’t normally do that well on our own.”
Now as for the individual responsible for taking on the bass responsibilities for the upcoming DEFTONES LP, that remains uncertain. Fred Sablan has been filling that role during live performances ever since DEFTONES parted ways with Sergio Vega in March of 2022.
