DEFTONES Wanted To Record ‘Ohms’ ‘Pretty Much Live As A Band,’ Says CHINO MORENO

In a new interview with Australia’s Music Feeds, Chino Moreno was asked if the challenge of finding new ways to present the new DEFTONES album, “Ohms”, has been “oddly refreshing” for him and his bandmates because of the current climate. He responded: “I don’t know if refreshing would be the best word, but it is a different experience, that’s for sure. The whole thing with us, when we’re making records, is that we’re always trying to find different angles or ways of approaching what we do. We’re never looking to completely reinvent ourselves, but at the same time, we are always looking to expand on what we’ve done before, both musically and in the way that we approach it. The thing that we did a little differently on this record is we took a bit of a different approach to the guitars. We wanted to record this one pretty much live as a band. We didn’t record to a click track or anything. It’s just us, much like we were when we were younger, playing together in a garage without all this technical stuff — basically just us playing off of each other and trying to feed off the energy in the room. I think that really helped capture that exciting vibe for us, made it feel like it used to when we were kids.”

Asked how “Ohms” compares to DEFTONES‘ previous album, 2016’s “Gore”, Moreno said: “The vibe in the band is a lot different from what went on with ‘Gore’, and that was our goal when we set out to make this record. We learned a lot when we were making that record. It was a little bit fragmented due to some reasons. This time we really wanted to get back to pulling that organic energy from all five guys in the band, firing on all pistons. That’s not something that you can just turn on either; it has to happen organically.

“We’ve been friends for so long and been through so much stuff, so we took our time to cultivate that energy, whereas on ‘Gore’, we went in for these writing sessions and just tried to bash out songs, and the first songs that we made got kept, and that was the record. On this one, we stretched it out over a year and a half, so we wrote, then we’d step back and reflect on what we’d done, and then work on it some more. We really let the songs and the record grow without the weight or pressure of having to have it done at a certain time. I really feel that contributed positively to the way that ‘Ohms’ sounds.”

“Ohms” will arrive on September 25 via Warner. The disc was recorded at Henson Studios in Los Angeles, California and Trainwreck Studios in Woodinville, Washington and boasts a familiar collaborator in veteran producer and engineer Terry Date, who worked on 1995’s “Adrenaline”, 1997’s “Around The Fur” and 2000’s “White Pony”.

DEFTONES includes Moreno, Frank Delgado, Stephen Carpenter, Abe Cunningham and Sergio Vega.