DEFTONES Recruits SHAUN LOPEZ (FAR, CROSSES) For Overseas Shows

Deftones has been finding live fill-in guitarists when they play overseas these days thanks to guitarist Stephen Carpenter refusing to leave the US. More specifically, Carpenter has some strong opinions on the Earth “being flat” and won’t get on a plane.

Deftones has historically recruited Lance Jackman as Carpenter‘s non-US replacement, but this time is leaning on Shaun Lopez of Far and Crosses (vocalist Chino Moreno‘s other band) instead. Deftones hasn’t issued a statement on Lopez joining them for their two shows in Spain, but Lopez made note of it in his recent Instagram stories.

Regardless of who’s playing with the band live, the other big news in Deftones world lately is that they’re completely done with their new record musically and it’s down to Moreno‘s vocals at this point. In a recent 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.”

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.