DEFTONES Gear Up for Spain with Guest Guitarist Shaun Lopez While Stephen Carpenter Stays Domestic
Alternative metal giants DEFTONES are hitting Madrid and Barcelona next week, with a special guest joining them onstage. While guitarist Stephen Carpenter remains committed to domestic shows for now, the band is ready to rock overseas with fill-ins.
Carpenter‘s decision to stay stateside sparked speculation in 2022, with some citing potential conflicts between his stance on COVID-19 vaccines and international travel restrictions.
Carpenter has also made his opinions on flat earth beliefs and jet travel quite apparent, telling Gnostic Academy last September: ““What snapped me out of my dream was all the things to do with air travel and the flight routes and stuff like that. Because I literally just came back from being on a plane. You know I’ve looked out the windows left and right of planes for years now and I’ve always been like wow look how far you can see.
“And never in any of those viewings do I ever remember anything representing a globe be present. Like you just know that whether you’re over land or over the ocean it’s just a table down there. It’s just a table top.”
Regardless of the reason, DEFTONES have enlisted talented musicians to keep the show on the road.
For their May 28th club show at La Riviera in Madrid, vocalist/guitarist Chino Moreno‘s longtime friend Shaun Lopez will step in. Fans of Chino‘s side project CROSSES (†††) will recognize Lopez, who shares musical duties with Moreno in that outfit.
A fellow Sacramento native, Lopez has known DEFTONES since their early days, having played in the post-hardcore outfit FAR. This familiarity will undoubtedly come in handy, especially as Lopez and Moreno will be touring Europe and the UK together with CROSSES (†††) immediately after DEFTONES‘ Spain stint.
Meanwhile, DEFTONES are putting the final touches on their highly anticipated tenth studio album, ensuring fans have new music to look forward to alongside these upcoming live shows.
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: ”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.”
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.
