Deftones frontman Chino Moreno says that the band's 'lost' album "will most likely never see the light of day".
The Sacramento band began work on what was intended to be their sixth studio album in the spring of 2007, and announced its working title, Eros, in January 2008. That April, the quintet began recording with producer Terry Date, but the studio sessions halted in the first week of November after bassist Chi Cheng and his sister was involved in a car crash in Santa Clara, California, which left Cheng in a coma.
In July 2009, the band announced that were indefinitely shelving Eros and were focussing their attention on writing a new record with new bassist Sergio Vega. In 2014, to mark the one year anniversary of Chi Cheng's passing on April 13, 2013, Chino Moreno uploaded one song from the sessions, Smile, to YouTube, but it was swiftly removed by the group's record label.
Speaking in a new interview with The Guardian, Moreno says that the group are unlikely to ever revisit the scrapped recordings.
"We’re always asked about Eros," he says. "It will most likely never see the light of day. That would involve going back to that period and resurrecting unfinished things, and somehow bringing them to completion. Dallas is the only song that was anywhere near finished.
"This new album [Private Music, released today, August 22] started with ideas we’d been working on alone, through the pandemic. And when we got together to actually start making the record, none of us wanted to look back at those ideas from the pandemic – we wanted to capture the moment we’re in today. So going back to try to capture what was happening back during Eros, and finishing those ideas, doesn’t really make sense."
In a 2016 interview with The Independent newspaper, Moreno admitted that he wasn't overly enthused about the lost recordings.
"Musically it’s probably 75-80% done and lyrically it was about halfway there, but honestly, I wasn’t too happy with the material we had," he stated. "Some of the music was lacking a little bit. I had faith it was going to come together and be great in the end, but we never got to that point."
Speaking in 20202 to Uproxx, Moreno added, “To open up those files would probably be heavy too. Emotionally heavy. Just because it’s the last thing that Chi played on. Not saying that we won’t do it, but we haven’t made any plans any time in the near future to do so.”
Deftones talk about new album Private Music in the new issue of Metal Hammer.
