You think it all sounds awesome, but then you do it and it’s like, ‘I kinda need people.’” “Snowboarding by yourself works for a bit, but you need connections.

“I didn’t have many friends, and sometimes had this overwhelming loneliness,” Moreno says. He found it, but the isolation turned out to be a warm-up for life under COVID-19. After eight years in Los Angeles, he’d moved to the rural mountain town of Bend, Ore., searching for a change of scenery (the band lives spread out across Sacramento, L.A., Portland and New York). 2 on the Billboard 200, the band’s best chart showing in almost a decade and a half.Īs they wrote their follow-up to “Gore” last year, though, Moreno was already cabin-fevered. Deftones had first found chart success and critical acclaim in the late 1990s for groundbreaking LPs “Around the Fur” and “White Pony,” but its 2016 LP “Gore” hit No. But the band was now on a creative and commercial upswing. The early 2010s were hard years: bassist Chi Cheng died in 2013, after years in a coma following a traffic accident. Disco-infatuated pop proved perfectly capable of shifting to beamed-in awards shows and livestreams.īefore COVID-19 changed its plans, the band had a lot to be optimistic about in 2020, as the group wrote and recorded “Ohms” for Reprise/Warner Records. Hip-hop was already dominant on streaming services and became the soundtrack of protests for Black lives on streets around the world. Over the last six months as the concert business has been obliterated, some music scenes have adapted to life online. “This was back when we all thought you couldn’t touch anything.”

I wouldn’t even go to the store for groceries,” Moreno, 47, says of the weeks in rural Woodinville, Wash., finishing the album as COVID-19 shut down concerts and any other place where people got within spitting distance. “Instead of getting a hotel, Terry had this trailer in his driveway and I slept out there.

When Chino Moreno tracked his vocals for Deftones’ new album “Ohms,” he barely bumped into a soul. But how do you get them into a new record if even the band can’t be in the same room together due to COVID-19? The job of any good metal album is capturing fans’ collective despair and fury.

Deftones albums 2019