DEFTONES Putting Finishing Touches On New Album

According to EW.com, DEFTONES has set a tentative October 9 release date for its seventh album.

Regarding the musical direction of the follow-up to 2010's "Diamond Eyes", DEFTONES vocalist Chino Moreno said, "Obviously we're an aggressive band — not the heaviest, but there's a lot of attack. But there's also this lush beauty that flows within everything that we do, and that's my favorite part of the band. To me, it's the epitome of what the DEFTONES do."

The CD was once again helmed by Nick Raskulinecz, who produced "Diamond Eyes" and has also worked with FOO FIGHTERS, RUSH, EVANESCENCE and ALICE IN CHAINS. "He's a very hands-on guy," Moreno told EW.com. "We adopted a work ethic that was really productive on the last record. We said we were going to work eight hours a day, and since we had those hours, everybody in there was super focused. Before that we had been working up in Sacramento, and the vibe was everybody would come in and hang out and we would work when we got around to it. We had to get more efficient."

As in the past, DEFTONES will record a handful of covers, some of which will undoubtedly make it various special editions of the new album. "We've done a lot of '80s stuff, but we wanted to do something from farther back," Moreno explained. "We sat down and everybody had their computers on and were playing songs that we like. So we're going to do an Elvis Presley song — we have five Elvis songs that we've been talking about. And we're going to do EARTH, WIND, AND FIRE. Hopefully we'll get at least two, maybe three or four."

He added, "It's always fun. We're done with the real creative part of having to come up with music out of thin air, and now we can be experimental with someone else's song."