We have a whole record recorded

Deftones have said they have finished recording the instrumentals for their upcoming album.

The legendary nu-metal band gave fans an update on their forthcoming material in a backstage interview with KROQ at Coachella.

Frontman Chino Moreno revealed that Deftones “have a whole record recorded all musically. And it’s pretty much my job right now to finish up the vocals.”

However, Moreno warned he didn’t want to “put a definite timeframe” on the album’s release, saying: “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.” Watch Moreno talk about the new record around five minutes and 18 seconds in:

Moreno also hinted at the musical direction Deftones would take with their new record, calling it an “invigorated” sound.

“We hadn’t written a record since — what was it? Pre-COVID, I think, when we were last in the studio,” he explained. “We’ve been playing shows, but we hadn’t really got into being creative. The creative part, to me, is always the funnest part of being in this band.

“Performing is great, but coming up with something out of nothing, that feeling cannot be topped,” he continued. “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.”

Guitarist Stephen Carpenter first confirmed the band were working on new material in September last year. He also revealed they were teaming up with producer Nick Raskulinecz (Rush, Mastodon, Alice In Chains) for their third collaboration together.

“Just in the last couple of months, really — two or three months; well, maybe a little longer now, really; February is when we started — we’re starting to work on new material for a new record,” Carpenter said.

He continued: “It’s going good now. It was a little slow at first, but it always is; dragging our feet ain’t nothing new. But we’ve got stuff up and going now, and we’re on a good little momentum at the moment. And we hope to have it all done and out by next spring [or] summer. There’s nothing official — no official date yet — but that’s our goal.”

It will be the follow up to 2020’s ‘Ohms‘, which NME gave a five-star review: “One imagines that the first day back in the studio with Terry Date might have been painful. It might have been cathartic. But what it seems to have done is give the band an attuned ear to the world. A platform to express rage they’ve never done before and to further solidify their status as the most interesting heavy metal band in the world.”

Deftones have just appeared at Coachella, where they performed their electrifying cover of The Smiths’ ‘Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want’. For more live updates as it happens, check out NME’s liveblog for Coachella 2024 here.

In other news, Deftones and System Of A Down have announced a huge show with The Mars Volta and more.