New DEFTONES Album Pushed Back To November

DEFTONES have pushed back the projected release date of their eighth studio album to late November. Frontman Chino Moreno told the New Jersey radio station WSOU (hear audio below): "As of today, we are rushing to get our 'thank-you's,' our credits, and all that stuff turned in. Once the music's turned in, which should be hopefully in the next couple of weeks…. There is still some mixing and mastering to be done. But the recording's all done, the songs are there, they're written and recorded, and they're awesome. We're excited about it. We're just dealing with the stuff now, putting all the artwork and everything together. And then, [it will take] a few months for them — the powers that be — to prepare it to be released."

Speaking about the new album's musical direction, Moreno said: "Every time we make a record, our main focus, with anything, is to try different things, and try things maybe outside our comfort zone a little bit. But this time, this record, one thing that's really cool, sonically, is that our bass player [Sergio Vega] is really not so much playing… He does play bass on some of the record, but [on] a lot of the record he plays a Bass VI, which is a six-string bass, which is more like a baritone guitar, sort of. So the way his frequency works with my guitar frequency and Stephen's [Carpenter] guitar frequency, it kind of [gave] it a different sound."

Chino also talked about the songwriting process for the follow-up to 2012's "Koi No Yokan". He said: "It's never easy, I don't think. I think we found better ways to work nowadays. We used to have our own studio in Sacramento, and we didn't have set hours or anything like that. We would show up at the studio at eight o'clock at night, and we'd get there, and we'd have no focus. I mean, we'd sit there for two hours watching 'Lost'… Seriously, we would just waste a lot of time, and by the time we'd start playing our instruments, it was midnight or one o'clock in the morning. We were taking three years sometimes to make records. And I attribute that to a lot of different things, but that was one of the main things. A couple of records back, we adopted this [routine] of going in at this hour — we start at noon and we end at five. And the room that we actually write in is pretty small, so while we're in there, we wanna be actually doing something productive. We just need to create, create, so we can get out of here for the day, and then listen to whatever we did the next morning, come [back] in, and do it again. We did, like, ten days, two weeks of writing sessions — going in and spending six days a week just doing that. We all live apart now — a couple of guys live in Sacramento, I live in Oregon, one guy lives in New York, and one guy lives in L.A. So, yeah, we all kind of fly in to meet at a certain spot and just work. And we all kind of go back to our little hideouts and come back and meet again. So it's kind of cool."

According to Moreno, sixteen songs were written for DEFTONES' new CD, which was once again produced by Matt Hyde (SLAYER, CHILDREN OF BODOM, MONSTER MAGNET, WINDS OF PLAGUE). The effort will feature a guest appearance by Jerry Cantrell (ALICE IN CHAINS).