CMU Approved

Approved: Deftones – Leathers

By | Published on Thursday 20 September 2012

Deftones

It’s hard to explain how much I love Deftones. They’re one of very few bands that I listened to in my teens that I still listen to with any sort of regularity, and one of even fewer that I do so without any sense of nostalgia. In fact, maybe I can condense it down for you – every time I listen to Deftones I have to fight the urge to tweet, “I fucking love Deftones”. How modern of me.

Anyway, in 2010, Deftones released ‘Diamond Eyes’, a staggering return to form after the phenomenally disappointing ‘Saturday Night Wrist’, and worthy of its existence for the M83 remix it spawned alone.

There was always the feeling (for me at least) that ‘Diamond Eyes’ could have been one last hurrah before the band headed into terminal decline. It’s a very good album, but it doesn’t see the band pushing themselves in the way they did on previous records, particularly ‘White Pony’.

This is something, it seems, the band also realised when they started work on new album, ‘Koi No Yokan’ (due for release on 12 Nov), frontman Chino Moreno saying recently: “Our records were starting to get pieced together versus really being created together, so for us it was a chance to get back to basics. Many songs are over five minutes long, with tons of cool tempo changes, and some real monsters”.

‘Leathers’ is the first track to be released from the new album, and lives up more to the ‘back to basics’ part of that comment than any of the rest of it (it’s only four minutes long for starters). It is, however, a very solid, very good Deftones song. I really hope that the album as a whole is more experimental and more of a stretch for them musically. That said, I probably wouldn’t mind if it was eleven tracks that sounded like this either:



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