The Deftones have been working on writing new material for several months now with a promised 2019 release, and a new interview in the print edition of Kerrang! with Chino Moreno sheds a bit of light on what the follow-up to Gore (2016) might sound like.

Chino qualified his statements about new music by saying that he doesn’t want to get too specific before having laid it down to tape, but he did offer the following when asked which of the band’s past works he would liken it to:

“That’s a good question, I don’t know, and it’s hard to say. Where we are with our writing process right now, it’s really difficult for me to put a single look on what we’re doing. It’s morphing every day that we get together and write. “We’re definitely getting into experimental sort of modes, which is the funnest phase that we get into. One of the biggest records in our career is obviously White Pony, and it’s our most commercially successful record as well, but that was also one of our most experimental records, especially for the time when it came out. That record, making it was… what’s a good word to describe it? We felt really free. “We basically made whatever we liked, whatever was happening at that moment. It didn’t really go along with what was going on around us, as far as our contemporaries and where other music was.”

What’s most interesting to me about Chino’s statement is that I don’t regard White Pony as an experimental record — it’s got some of the band’s biggest mainstream hits on it — but viewed through the lens of what was going on in the nu-metal scene at the time I can certainly understand what he’s saying. To that, he offered further:

“Well, at the time, honestly, with bands like Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach and what was to be coined nü-metal or whatever, that was at its height. And we probably made our most un-nü-metal record. I don’t know why we did it. Like I said, we were into experimenting more than we were trying to do something that we felt we already did. “That’s why it’s hard to answer the question about the future and what comes next. But if anything I would say that [I’m reminded of] ‘White Pony‘, that record in general, because it was probably us at our most experimental.”

As always, we’ll just have to wait and see. Guitarist Stephen Carpenter will allegedly play a bigger role in the writing process this time around after having felt unhappy with his role in the creation of Gore.

[via The PRP]