“As you may or may not have heard, I had some trouble liking some stuff in the beginning,” Carpenter says with a bearded grin. Much of the conflict famously comes from the creative sparks between Moreno and Carpenter, with the singer playing Morrissey to the guitarist’s Meshuggah. “We’re different enough that things rub a certain way. “That push and pull is what gives us our thing, whatever that is,” says Frank Delgado, keyboardist and sound scientist. For the Deftones, new music traditionally grows out of the ongoing creative tension within the band, which they’ve just learned to accept. Final vocals were recorded in Oregon, where Moreno now lives. But when the band gathered for a rehearsal this week, they hadn’t played the shimmering, crushing “Prayers/Triangles” since recording it a year ago.Īlbum sessions in Los Angeles led to tracks built on heavy walls of sound and feeling, colliding the ethereal with the heavy, the light and the dark. In just over 24 hours, the quintet will perform their first live show since narrowly escaping being caught up in the Paris terrorist attacks last November. It’s been four years since the last Deftones studio album, Koi No Yokan, and the band is fully back in action. Singer Chino Moreno is pacing, leaping and whipping his mic chord anxiously, overcome with the sensations of a cut he describes as “perpetual motion, like the whole song is tumbling over itself.” Abe Cunningham is really pounding those drums, and Stephen Carpenter is bent over his guitar, carefully playing every part, though none of them are even plugged in.

When the recorded track begins again with layers of guitar feedback and muscular beats, the band doesn’t just walk through it. It’s an austere setting for a band of intense highs and lows, as a music video crew prepares for another take of “Prayers/Triangles,” the atmospheric opening song on the new Deftones album, Gore. During a brief moment of calm on a Los Angeles soundstage, the five members of the Deftones stand restlessly in a room of bright white light.

List of deftones albums