Deftones Announce New Album & US Tour Dates 9/10/2012 Alt-metal veterans the Deftones have announced details on the release of their seventh studio album, reports Clash Magazine.
DEFTONES have pushed back the projected release date of their eighth studio album to late November. Frontman Chino Moreno told the New Jersey radio station WSOU (hear audio below): 'As of today, we are rushing to get our 'thank-you's,' our credits, and all that stuff turned in. Once the music's turned in, which should be hopefully in the next couple of weeks…. There is still some mixing and mastering to be done. But the recording's all done, the songs are there, they're written and recorded, and they're awesome. We're excited about it. We're just dealing with the stuff now, putting all the artwork and everything together. And then, [it will take] a few months for them — the powers that be — to prepare it to be released.'
Speaking about the new album's musical direction, Moreno said: 'Every time we make a record, our main focus, with anything, is to try different things, and try things maybe outside our comfort zone a little bit. But this time, this record, one thing that's really cool, sonically, is that our bass player [Sergio Vega] is really not so much playing… He does play bass on some of the record, but [on] a lot of the record he plays a Bass VI, which is a six-string bass, which is more like a baritone guitar, sort of. So the way his frequency works with my guitar frequency and Stephen's [Carpenter] guitar frequency, it kind of [gave] it a different sound.'
Chino also talked about the songwriting process for the follow-up to 2012's 'Koi No Yokan'. He said: 'It's never easy, I don't think. I think we found better ways to work nowadays. We used to have our own studio in Sacramento, and we didn't have set hours or anything like that. We would show up at the studio at eight o'clock at night, and we'd get there, and we'd have no focus. I mean, we'd sit there for two hours watching 'Lost'… Seriously, we would just waste a lot of time, and by the time we'd start playing our instruments, it was midnight or one o'clock in the morning. We were taking three years sometimes to make records. And I attribute that to a lot of different things, but that was one of the main things. A couple of records back, we adopted this [routine] of going in at this hour — we start at noon and we end at five. And the room that we actually write in is pretty small, so while we're in there, we wanna be actually doing something productive. We just need to create, create, so we can get out of here for the day, and then listen to whatever we did the next morning, come [back] in, and do it again. We did, like, ten days, two weeks of writing sessions — going in and spending six days a week just doing that. We all live apart now — a couple of guys live in Sacramento, I live in Oregon, one guy lives in New York, and one guy lives in L.A. So, yeah, we all kind of fly in to meet at a certain spot and just work. And we all kind of go back to our little hideouts and come back and meet again. So it's kind of cool.'
According to Moreno, sixteen songs were written for DEFTONES' new CD, which was once again produced by Matt Hyde (SLAYER, CHILDREN OF BODOM, MONSTER MAGNET, WINDS OF PLAGUE). The effort will feature a guest appearance by Jerry Cantrell (ALICE IN CHAINS).
During appearance on this past weekend's edition of BBC Radio 1's 'Rock Show' with Daniel P. Carter, DEFTONES frontman Chino Moreno offered an update on the band's follow-up to 2012's 'Koi No Yokan', which is tentatively scheduled for release on September 25.
'The record, as far as music, has been all recorded, and I am currently working on the vocals,' he said. 'So I've been recording from my home studio here in Oregon. Slowly but surely, [we're] getting it done, man. It's coming out really good. It's just another DEFTONES record. And I feel like it's us reaching a little bit, getting more into the song structures and trying to challenge ourselves a little bit, you know what I mean? It's sounding good. I think it's gonna be a great record.'
Moreno also talked about DEFTONES' upcoming appearance at the Amnesia Rockfest in Montebello, Quebec, Canada where the band will perform its 1997 album, 'Around The Fur', in its entirety. '[It] should be fun,' he said. 'It might be a little bit of a challenge, 'cause there's some songs on that record that we haven't played for years. We've yet to really rehearse for that. That was before I started playing guitar too, so it's just, like, all I gotta do is go out there and sing for, like, 45 minutes. It should be pretty easy, but who's to say?!'
Chino recently told RollingStone.com about the DEFTONES' next CD: 'The songs are amazing, and we wrote them in a really cool way. We had all of us in a room together with one person expressing an idea and another person jumping on it. The songs are really built as a collective. We have five guys who have almost completely different takes on music, so when it works, it works great.'
According to Moreno, sixteen songs were written for the new album, which is once again being produced by Matt Hyde (SLAYER, CHILDREN OF BODOM, MONSTER MAGNET, WINDS OF PLAGUE).
'I think it's a little more of a heady record,' Moreno said when asked how the DEFTONES' new material compares to that on 'Koi No Yokan'. 'I feel like we've gone into the songs and really dissected them. If something sounded a little straight, we took a left turn and made things a little screwy. We just tried something completely opposite, not to sabotage it, but to challenge ourselves and try new things that we haven't done in the past.
'It definitely feels like we've taken a step from our last record,' he continued. 'But it's definitely a DEFTONES record, and it has all the elements that make us who we are. We're not going out there to change anything, other than just thinking outside the box.'