DeftonesIt’s a day of conflicting emotions for fans of Californian metal icons Deftones, with the band’s long-shelved Eros album reportedly leaking after almost two decades.
The leak occurred earlier today on the Sharing Lungs forum, a community for fans of the band. In a longstanding thread aptly titled Eros, users were discussing leaked snippets from the record when another user ducked in to share the entirety of the officially unreleased record.
The forum thread has since been locked, the offending material removed, and the band themselves have not yet commented on the authenticity of the leak.
For fans of Deftones, the release of Eros is a momentous – if bittersweet – occasion.
Following the release of their 2006 album Saturday Night Wrist, members managed to overcome deep internal tensions to forge ahead as a recording and touring outfit. In 2007, they began the writing process for what would ostensibly be their sixth studio record, and in early 2008, revealed that the album had the working title of Eros.
“Our working relationship is better than it's ever been before,” frontman Chino Moreno said at the time. As a result, everything has improved – our friendships and our lives. We're all really happy now.”
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Reuniting with producer Terry Date, the group began recording sessions in April of that year, and continued working sporadically until November. Alongside providing updates in the album’s progress, a new track titled Melanie was played live just twice in September, just as the mixing process began.
On November 4th, however, bassist Chi Cheng was seriously injured when he was involved in a car crash, leaving him in a comatose state. Despite positive updates in regard to his condition in the coming years, Cheng ultimately passed away in April 2013 at the age of 42.
In the aftermath of Cheng’s initial accident, Deftones ceased working on Eros, and Quicksand bassist Sergio Vega would step into the fold, remaining with the group until 2021. Alongside Vega’s arrival, the band began working on their next record, releasing Diamond Eyes in 2010.
Since then, questions arose as to whether or not any of the material recorded for Eros would ever see the light of day. While claims were made by Moreno that “there’s only like 6 songs that are finished”, it was unclear as to whether the band would complete the roughly “six months” of work required to cap off the recording process.
“I feel more positive now that it will see the light of day than I did in the past so we’ll see what happens,” Moreno said in the wake of Cheng’s passing in 2013, reversing his opinion just last year by stating it would “most likely never see the light of day”.
“That would involve going back to that period and resurrecting unfinished things, and somehow bringing them to completion,” he told The Guardian. “Dallas is the only song that was anywhere near finished. This new album started with ideas we’d been working on alone, through the pandemic. And when we got together to actually start making the record, none of us wanted to look back at those ideas from the pandemic – we wanted to capture the moment we’re in today.
“So going back to try to capture what was happening back during Eros, and finishing those ideas, doesn’t really make sense.”
Statements like this have left fans wondering as to what it is they’re actually hearing in this new leaked version. Despite Moreno’s claims that Dallas was “the only song that was anywhere near finished,” he did release the track Smile in 2014, though it was quickly removed by the record label.
This somewhat tracks with comments from drummer Abe Cunningham, who said in 2020 that the album “was never completed”, and that the material which was completed could be put out as “maybe a condensed version or an EP of four or five songs, something like that.”
As a result, many fans have responded to the leak with conflicting emotions, unsure of whether their natural curiosity should outweigh the band’s wishes for the music to not be released officially – especially if it was not completed to their planned standards.
Alongside the release of Eros, demo versions from their 2020 album Ohms have also leaked, though the 2008 record has been the main topic of discussion amongst fans.
Most interestingly, despite the ‘darker’ tone of Eros and the years of anticipation behind it, many fans who have discussed its release have wondered whether Deftones’ career trajectory would have remained the same had Eros arrived as their sixth album instead of Diamond Eyes.
It remains to be seen whether Deftones will address the legitimacy of, or comment on, the leaked version of the record.
