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Deftones’ New Album Finally Has A Release Date

Their Australian tour with Soundwave may have been officially shit-canned for now but that doesn’t mean we can’t still get excited about Deftones‘ new album.

The follow-up to 2012’s Koi No Yokan had been vaguely slated for release late last year, but now – it seems – we can expect the record to drop in a just few short months’ time.

Deftones’ guitarist Stephen Carpenter has let slip an April 8th release date for the alternative metal champs’ eighth studio effort.

He dropped the bombshell during an interview with ESP Guitars at a trade show in California, telling ESP: “[We’re] sitting around waiting for the release of our new record… Comes out April 8th, and we have some dates in Texas in March”.

Hopefully some Aussie dates will follow too, eh fellas?

Speaking in March last year, frontman Chino Moreno described the band’s new LP as a departure from their last one, Koi No Yokan.

“I think it’s a little more of a heady record. I feel like we’ve gone into the songs and really dissected them,” he said. “If something sounded a little straight, we took a left turn and made things a little screwy. We just tried something completely opposite, not to sabotage it, but to challenge ourselves and try new things that we haven’t done in the past.”

“It definitely feels like we’ve taken a step from our last record,” he continued. “But it’s definitely a DEFTONES record, and it has all the elements that make us who we are. We’re not going out there to change anything, other than just thinking outside the box.”

Produced by their long-time mate Matt Hyde (Slayer, Children Of Bodom, Monster Magnet), the disc is also tipped to feature 16 new tracks, which is the most the group has ever recorded for an LP.

“The songs are amazing, and we wrote them in a really cool way,” Moreno said. “We had all of us in a room together with one person expressing an idea and another person jumping on it. The songs are really built as a collective. We have five guys who have almost completely different takes on music, so when it works, it works great.”

Moreno also let the cat out of the bag on one particular musical guest who’ll be featured on the new Deftones record, revealing that the band tapped Alice In Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell to lay down a tasty guitar solo on one of the new tracks.

Speaking back in May, Moreno confessed to getting a bit emotional when he first heard the fruits of their collaboration: “It’s like you’re hearing a Deftones song, but all of a sudden, a little bit of Alice In Chains seeps its way in there, and it’s kind of neat,” he said. “I mean, me, as a fan, I was just sitting back and a little tear came out of my eye.”

Watch Stephen Carpenter’s entire interview with ESP, during which he also chats about playing eight-string guitars, being influenced by Meshuggah, and more, below.

Watch: Stephen Carpenter (Deftones) NAMM 2016 Interview

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