Deftones – Diamond Eyes

"Beautiful" is how DEFTONES vocalist and guitarist Chino Moreno describes the new DEFTONES album Diamond Eyes in conversation. "We have no problem being beautiful." Beautiful is a term that hardly any normal rock band with hard riffs would use, but in the end, the DEFTONES are not a 'normal' hard rock band. As kids they schooled themselves on Anthrax, The Smiths, Pantera and The Cure, skateboarding and "The Smurfs," after high school they mixed trip hop with thrash in a band format, melodic vocals with debauched echo chambers and, yes, the beautiful with the ugly. They crossed genre boundaries and mocked the simplifying iPod categorization á la "Heavy Metal", "Hard -Rock" and "Alternative". This is exactly what made them chart-toppers and headliners in equal measure. But more than that, DEFTONES have held it together throughout their complicated tenure and now present one of their best albums. For the song-laden Diamond Eyes is just that: an album from start to finish, the way records used to be in the 'good old days': Each song carries you a little further from your everyday life, until you arrive at a place that feels a lot better than the one you left from. There's another fact, though, that makes Diamond Eyes special in the DEFTONES canon: the band recorded the album after their best friend and bassist Chi Cheng suffered a severe brain injury in a car accident in November. "After Chi's accident, nothing would have been easier than making a sad album," Moreno explains. "It was like a cloud was hanging over us, so we set a goal to make something uplifting. I think that's why there's a lot of fantasy stuff on the album. I tried to keep everyday issues out of the themes of the songs and make everything a bit more abstract, a bit more artistic. It may sound strange, but this is really an optimistic album." And a relatively spontaneous one at that. Diamond Eyes was created in six months with the help of former Quicksand bassist Sergio Vega and producer Nick Raskulinecz (Foo Fighters, Alice In Chains, Rush). Remarkably, DEFTONES had just recorded a full album titled Eros, which they eventually shelved. "To be honest, I knew there was something better to come," Chino confirms. Starting completely from scratch has definitely been a brave decision for a band that takes a lot of time for each album. Drummer Abe was skeptical of the decision at first, especially because recording an album in the past has always been enormously difficult: "Each of the previous albums was like having a tooth pulled, or worse, like having surgery without anesthesia," he muses. "But this time we just said to ourselves, fuck it, we're still best friends, all of us. And we can still do this. So we cheered each other up, got creative and shot out of all the guns