CHINO MORENO On DEFTONES’ Upcoming Album: “It’s An Invigorated Kind Of Sound”

The good news is that Deftones is completely done with their new record musically! The other good (but slow-burning) news is that Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno is working on vocals, and he’s gonna take as long as it takes to get ’em right.

In an interview backstage at Coachella, Moreno spoke a little about the record, saying he’s been in and out of the studio for a little while now honing his performance on the upcoming record.

“We haven’t really talked much [publicly] about it,” said Moreno. “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.”

On how new Deftones sounds four years out from Ohms, Moreno added: “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.”

Otherwise, all we know is that Deftones was working with producer Nick Raskulinecz (Rush, Mastodon, Alice In Chains, etc.) on the new stuff. The new Deftones album will be their first without bassist Sergio Vega, who played on the band’s previous four albums and quit in 2021. Fred Sablan has been filling in with Deftones live, but the band has never announced an official replacement for Vega.