DEFTONES HAVE COME HOME
Walking into their Sacramento rehearsal space, to work there for the first time since bassist Chi Cheng passed away, Deftones frontman Chino Moreno felt heavy.
“We all had our own little stations in the studio, and Chi’s station was exactly how he’d left it, with his Tibetan flag hanging up and all his gear”, he says. “We had these dry-erase boards with some of the old songs we were working on written on them. It was like walking into a time capsule - it was a trip.”
They had last been at ‘The Spot’ in 2008, making what should have been their sixth album, Eros, but abandoned the material and the building after Chi was in a car accident, leaving him with injuries from which he would never recover. When it was time to start work on new album Ohms, the band decided to revamp the area, and assembled for a week of cleaning, carpeting, painting and bringing in new furnishings. It held profoundly personal memories for each of them, of all-nighters spent playing music, skating on the inbuilt halfpipe and sleeping in the lofts. There were great times, and times spent living on the edge. Chino went to his own room and purged boxes of stuff that “had old memories tied to it that I didn’t want”.
“I was opening up these boxes of old clothes and electronics. A lot of it was stuff that maybe someone would have wanted, or
