Deftones: Garage Days Revisited

“I’ve had nine cups of coffee and I’m flappin’ my lips,” speed raps Abe Cunningham, Deftones' unsurprisingly wired awake drummer. “It’s a trip when you’ve been out of practice for a while, people make a joke of it and say ‘what are you going to do today, talk about yourself?’ Well yeah, that’s the gist of it.”

Speaking between rehearsals, Cunningham and frontman Chino Moreno eagerly plot the next few years of their lives before the quintet's sixth album – though technically it's their seventh, but we'll get to that – even hits the shelves. “The dates are coming in,” Cunningham booms. “We’re hoping for two to two and a half years on the road if possible – if done right – hopefully without killing each other. We’re getting ready to go, this is it right now.” Moreno agrees, equally juiced at the prospect. “That sounds good to me,” he nods, “… haven’t been this excited about a record cycle in a while. Everybody’s pretty eager to get out there.”

And who could blame them. Since retreating to finish the construction of their Sacramento studio in an effort to execute the production process of a new album in their own territory, Deftones took time to heal following the much publicised rifts that drove them apart when recording the visceral Saturday Night Wrist in 2006. “We even put a little bar up there with a few kegs, so every day we’d come in and shoot the shit,” says Cunningham. “Chi [Cheng, bass] was going through a divorce at the time, so he’d come in and we’d all be ‘what’s up?’ It was quite the opposite of Saturday Night Wrist – we were doing it in our own place, having a great time and being best friends again. That being said, the record was nearly done, we’d started to mix it and go through artwork. I think Chino had a couple of little things to finish off, but it was just about done. And then – bam – we get news of this accident, man.”

The ‘accident’ being a severe car crash involving Cheng in November 2008, which left him comatose for several months. Although his condition has since improved – largely thanks to the fundraising efforts for healthcare by his friends, family, band mates and peers – today he remains in a ‘minimally conscious state.’ “We’re still absolutely blown away,” remarks Cunningham. “We took a couple of months off at the time to contemplate; we thought ‘damn, is this it? Are we done?’ Then we decided to get back to what’s kept us going for the past 20 plus years: hole up in that little room and play music, ‘cos that’s what we do.”

With a headlining slot at a Californian festival the following April to fulfil – the fee for which would go towards Cheng’s recovery costs – Deftones enlisted Sergio Vega from New York post-hardcore stalwarts Quicksand to stand in for their ailing comrade. “Quicksand were a band that we all totally loved and he had filled in for Chi in the past,” says Cunningham. “It was just a case of calling him up to see if he could help us out with this one show. That being said, he came out and it was great, we went over the set we had and wrote a song that day.”

Still devastated by the limbo of their bassist but galvanised by the experience (“this is the appreciation of life; it’s the reaffirmation of 'look, man, we’re here so quick and things can be taken quick too', so we just got down to it” – Cunningham), the two say Vega gave new focus to the group from the first rehearsal, though Cheng remained at the core of their decision-making.

“We were left with an unstable foundation, but it didn’t feel right to say ‘OK, let’s teach him everything Chi just wrote in the last few months'," Moreno recalls. "It felt like the page had turned on everything that had happened up until the accident; we were starting a new chapter. We didn’t really sit around and talk; we just got into a really creative headspace and spoke through our instruments at each other. It was probably the most focused we’ve been as a band in maybe ten years or so, certainly like the start of our career when there were less outside influences and it was all about being kids playing in the garage. That was our life in there, making those records. It feels like we did that again.”

With Vega embedded in the fold, the band dropped their old piecemeal work ethic to write together in a room prior to hitting the studio – the first they’d done so since 1998’s Around the Fur, perhaps indicative of the resulting work’s fluency and cohesion – and pretty soon Deftones were looking at an entirely new set of songs. “We thought ‘wow, this is fun! Do you want to make a record?’" says Cunningham. “It would seem that it would be hard to, having this black cloud over our heads,” continues Moreno. ”But the music was therapeutic in that.”

The album resulting from the 2008 sessions – Eros – has since been indefinitely shelved, with the more recent fruits of their labour (entitled Diamond Eyes) due for release this month. “It was a difficult decision,” says Moreno. “One of the main reasons for doing it, for me at least, was out of respect for Chi. We were almost finished with Eros, but if we’d just released that record it wouldn’t have felt right.” Nevertheless, the pair remains optimistic that Cheng will see his way to better health. “Hopefully he can join us again,” says Cunningham. “In the meantime we’ve put the album on the backburner. We haven’t moved on from Chi – we can’t move on – we’ve just continued on. The way we see it at this point is we have two bass players.”

With Diamond Eyes, Deftones deliver more of what they’ve always been threatening: a stupefying marriage of emotive delicacy with punishing breakdowns and fleeting allusions to their recent struggle, shot through with a renewed sense of optimism. “We’re still here,” Cunningham offers in summary. “I think we’ve been very broken at times, the way we do things – I know we have – you take one step forward and ten steps backwards – but none of that matters anymore, it’s all been part of the process.”

As a work in its own right, Cunningham is quick to distance Diamond Eyes from its slightly older sibling. “People are curious; they thought maybe we used some of the riffs from a few of the songs on Eros but we didn’t, we just left that be and started completely from scratch.” Moreno, too, testifies to the album’s unique strength, certain that this is their most representative work to date. “The reason I feel so strongly about this record is that it doesn’t feel like a completely different Deftones,” he affirms. “It’s the band we’ve always been… just a little bit more daring.”

Lyrically, Diamond Eyes evokes a visual feast of romance, horror and science fiction, owing to the band's versatile palette and Moreno’s own fascination with the moving image. “There’s a lot of sex and violence in there, those are the things that are quite artistically inspiring to me. One of my favourite pastimes is to dig up rare and archived film – be it war footage or whatever – from the very early days of cinema, and then recording music to it. I make these little movies; they’re usually only a minute or so long. Carrying that over into Deftones, when we’re writing stuff I see visuals a lot, the music always sparks those ideas.”

Hinting at the long-delayed resurrection of Team Sleep, Moreno's side-project with childhood friend Todd Crook and the prolific Zach Hill (Hella, Good Moon), he's certain it will remain exactly that. “It's always been more of a project than a band," he states. "We’ve been talking about a return to the initial idea of how it started. At that time it was us trading music – four-track tapes – one of us would put down an idea and we’d pass it around. The future of Team Sleep is going to be us trading files over the internet and building it in the same way.”

Moreno also expresses an appreciation for Scottish rock, and an eagerness to pursue one particular collaborative possibility. “Mogwai sent me one of their songs to record vocals over," he laments, "but I never got a chance to do it. We talk, still, about doing something in the future; I’d still be way interested to work with that band.”

And as Deftones put the dust blankets down in their studio and prepare to rack up multiple stamps on their collective passport ("we’ll be back and forth to Scotland several times over the next two years” – Cunningham), they lament the pastimes they’re about to leave behind. “We play a lot of poker,” Moreno confesses. “We played a lot of Risk, especially when we were making the Eros record, trying to take over the world one continent at a time. We’d have some serious Risk games going on, that shit can last for weeks!”