Deftones – Diamond Eyes LP

Deftones – Diamond Eyes 

"Beautiful" is how DEFTONES singer and guitarist Chino Moreno describes the new DEFTONES album Diamond Eyes in conversation. "We have no problems with being beautiful." Beautiful is a term that hardly any normal rock band with hard riffs would use, but ultimately the DEFTONES are not a 'normal' hard rock band either. As kids, they trained themselves on Anthrax, The Smiths, Pantera and The Cure, skateboarding and "The Smurfs"; after high school, they mixed trip hop with thrash in band format, melodic vocals with excessive echo chambers and, yes, the beautiful with the ugly. They crossed genre boundaries and mocked the simplistic iPod categorization á la "heavy metal", "hard rock" and "alternative". In doing so, they became 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. Because the song-packed Diamond Eyes is just that: an album from start to finish, just like records used to be in the 'good old days': Each song carries you a little further away from your everyday life until you arrive at a place that feels a lot better than the one you started from. But there's another fact that makes Diamond Eyes special in the DEFTONES canon: the band recorded the album after their best friend and bass player Chi Cheng suffered a serious brain injury in a car accident in November. "After Chi's accident, nothing would have been easier than making a sad album," explains Moreno. "It was like a cloud was hanging over us, so we set out to make something uplifting. I think that's why there's a lot of fantasy stuff on the album. I tried to keep everyday problems out of the themes of the songs and make everything a bit more abstract, a bit more artistic. It may sound strange, but this really is 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 entitled Eros, which they eventually shelved. "To be honest, I knew there was something better to come," confirms Chino. Starting from scratch was a brave decision for a band that takes a lot of time for each album. Drummer Abe was initially skeptical about this decision, mainly because recording an album in the past has always been enormously difficult: "Each of the previous albums was like having a tooth pulled, or even worse: like being operated on 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 ourselves up, got creative and fired from all cylinders

Tracklist:
1. Diamond Eyes
2. Royal
3. Cmnd/Ctrl
4. You've Seen the Butcher
5. Beauty School
6. Prince
7. Rocket Skates
8. Sextape
9. Risk
10. 976-Evil
11. This Place is Death

Label: Reprise
Released: 2010/2021