The partially-finished Eros project has long been a hot topic of Deftones lore. The band had been working on an album with that tentative title as the follow-up to Saturday Night Wrist, released in 2006, when bassist Chi Cheng was in a 2008 car accident that left him incapacitated. After a period of grieving, the band enlisted former Quicksand bassist Sergio Vega and started a new album from scratch, eventually releasing Diamond Eyes in 2010. Cheng would pass in 2013, but the topic of Eros has come up in interviews ever since, with the band members consistently expressing hesitation about returning to that material.
In a recent chat Download TV conducted with Deftones’ Abe Cunningham over the weekend, the drummer addressed the topic, sharing his thoughts on whether it would ever be released:
“…It was never completed, and that’s what people don’t get, like, ‘What, you’re just sitting on it?’ and I mean no, we’re not just sitting on it, we never finished it. And then he [Chi Cheng] got in his accident and that’s kinda where it just stopped.
“And quite frankly it’s not that good. There’s some songs that are really good. But I gotta be honest, it was like, you know, we were just trying to get back to it and see what we can come up with then… and it’s not that it’s not good, it’s just… there’s a lot attached to it as well, you know? And I understand that people are passionate about that and they want to hear Chi‘s last musical contribution.”
I’m not sure I ever realized the extent to which the Eros tracks were unfinished — I’d thought they were in a mostly recorded state with just some finishing touches needed — but Cunningham makes it sound as if the writing was far from complete with lines like “we were just trying to get back to it and see what we can come up with.”
Cunningham went on to discuss whether the material could ever see the light of day in spite of that:
“We’ve talked about putting out maybe a condensed version or an EP of four or five songs, something like that, and that kind of makes sense. But we have to get into all the legalities of it and all that stuff and also we have to finish it. But yeah, it would be nice for that to see the light of day, definitely.”
Can you imagine revisiting stuff you started writing 12 years ago and trying to get back in the groove with it? It’d be awkward, you’d be out of sorts, disconnected, in a completely different place now. What’s more, all that emotional baggage connected to this particular set of recordings, as Abe acknowledges.
Needless to say “we’ve talked about” is not the same as “we’re going to,” but “we’ve talked about” is still better than “we will never” as far as Deftones fans are concerned. Having said that, given all the fan discussion surrounding Eros over the years — and Cunningham’s stated reluctance due to the unfinished nature of it — it’s hard to imagine it living up to expectations at this point.
Elsewhere in the same interview, Cunningham revealed that the band’s new album is fully mixed and they’re eyeing a September release for it, although that is by no means a confirmed time period.
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