Sergio Vega says he's found that "Gore," his third release since joining Deftones, is a very polarizing effort.

Pitchfork, for example, said it's "easily" their "most engaging record since 'White Pony'," a Y2K release that felt like the nu-metal answer to “OK Computer" at the time. And Pitchfork may be onto something there, although there's clearly something to be said for their self-titled effort that followed "White Pony" as well as "Diamond Eyes," Vega's first album.

But others weren't sure what to make of this most recent effort.

"Some people were very conflicted by it," Vega says. "It’s my third album with the band and the first two albums, people wrapped their heads around them more easily, where this one, some people were like, 'I don’t know.' And then I would read those same people later — I spend a lot of time online, I see comments — and I saw people warm up to it and really start to get it.

"But then I also saw what you were saying, where people right out of the box were like, 'This is just… I feel it, I know exactly where it’s coming from.' To me, I think that’s awesome, the whole spectrum of it."

Some of Vega's favorite albums took a minute to digest.

"I remember first hearing Jane’s Addiction," he says. "And I remember when I first heard the first Wu-Tang Clan record. And bands like My Bloody Valentine, where it was like a shock to my aesthetic. It felt ugly to me in a way. But it somehow called me back and they became some of my favorite records and favorite groups ever. So I’m not afraid to have something that shocks people or gets them upset at first. Over time, given the opportunity, especially when they see these songs live, they can get into it."

Vega, who joined the fold in 2009 when a traffic collision left founding bassist Chi Cheng in a minimally conscious state until his death in 2013, checked in from the road to talk about the tour with Rise Against that makes its way to Phoenix July 9. He also talked about "Gore," the writing process and a friendship with his fellow Deftones that stretches back to 1995, when they met on the first Vans Warped Tour.

Deftones fans should plan on heading to Rebel Lounge after the show, where Vega will trade in his bass for DJ gear while hosting the official Deftones after-party.

Question: What it is about this record that it took some people a little bit of time to wrap their heads around it?

Answer: What I’ve noticed with people who are really intense with a band, who really have a passion for a band, they feel they have a certain ownership over it. They’ll feel like they can have a personal forecasting of where the band’s gonna go or what it should do. So sometimes if it doesn’t conform to their preconception, it’s not working.

There doesn’t have to be anything more complex than that. But again, over time, things really start to settle for those who didn’t get it immediately. I find that with the self-titled record and “Saturday Night Wrist” record, which are both before my time, the way I saw those albums being looked at, it was kind of a lot less favorable than they are now.

And I think over time, people really started to see that those albums were much stronger than they had initially thought.

Q: Coming into the band when you did, what was your impression of Deftones as an outsider?

A: Well, I was never really an outsider in the sense that we’ve been friends since ’95. My other band, Quicksand, was on the first Warped Tour with them. And my friends got me to go check them out under the notion that they were big Bad Brains fans, which for me coming from the hardcore scene, that’s what was appealing to me.

And then I met them and we hung out and became acquainted very early on. So we’ve been friends forever. I’ve never really been outside of it. And with them being friends of Quicksand as a band and counting that band as one of the bands they really liked and were inspired by, I was always an easy fit.

We had a friendship and aesthetically there was a commonality. And they’re very open people, really good people and collaborative. So from the jump, they were like, “You know, we’re friends.” There wasn’t too much to say. It was just like jam and have a good time.

And for me, personally, it was always about just putting my best foot forward for my friends who were in need, who just needed somebody to come in and lend a hand, basically.

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Q: So it clicked pretty quickly, then, when you started working on music together?

A: I mean, immediately. There wasn’t a challenge or anything weird about it.

Q: When you start working on an album, do you have a conversation about where you’re headed this time?

A: No. That kind of stuff is decidedly what we do not do. And thankfully, we started to own that and we’re proud of it. There are bands that make a conscious decision and they frame out the parameters of what the content should be like. But our criteria is a bit more primal. Our criteria is that it really excites us and that’s literally it.

So it basically comes together like a hive mind. If you have ideas in your head as an individual, you know, sometimes there’s a lot of noise and a lot of clutter and you hear things clashing around but something kind of rises from that and becomes a firm thought. It’s no different than how we write.

We get into a room and everyone’s noodling around and making noise with tones and somewhere in that literal chaos of clashing sounds, a riff develops that catches someone’s ear and then another person jumps on it. Everyone in the band is an active listener. So if we hear something we like, we’re very quick to add to it.

And we’re always recording everything. So we have it all kind of documented so we can go back and take little things that we like and flesh them out. We also send each other little riffs and parts but those things are kind of like what I call seeds. When we get in the room together, everyone brings their personality to the song idea.

Everything is super-collaborative and the fun part for me is how people have this kind of thought about what Deftones is, like Stephen does the heavy stuff and Chino does the ethereal stuff. It’s like if you only knew how this s--t happened, it’s way cooler than that lame-ass story.

Q: I enjoyed your insights in an article I read in, I think, Rolling Stone about the talk of the tension that went into this recording.

A: There is always gonna be some sort of friction when you have five people trying to sort out ideas because the way that it happens is that there’s an initial spark of an idea that at least a few people feel is awesome.

The hard part is to make it a song. And when you have a bunch of people with strong personalities and strong wills and their own palette or references, that’s the challenge. The idea of tension as a destructive, negative force is wrong.

Sometimes, when you’re passionate, tempers can rage. It’s not that you’re arguing with each other but you’re getting frustrated because you want something to be awesome really badly and you’re also trying to understand each other on the fly.

What really happened, and it wasn’t borne from nothing, is Stephen did an interview a lot of people cited and drew from. But you know, they caught him on a day and he said s—t that people were able to run with and make it seem like things were really f—king crazy in our world.

And when we saw him right after that, he was surprised that nobody called to ask him, “What was that?” We were like, “Man, we know you. We’re homies.” (laughs) And we get along really well. With the exception of me, these guys are childhood friends. And I’ve been around since ’95. So I’m not, like, new to the party.

Q: You play six-string bass on this record, right?

A: In a sense. Not the six-string people think about. I play a Fender VI, which is a different animal entirely. It’s on over half the record. If you do a quick Google search on it, you’ll see what it looks like and you’ll be like, “OK, that is not what I thought it was.”

It’s the third bass that Fender ever made, I think in the late '50s, early '60s. And it was meant to be more of a lead instrument, not bass. So it’s not those big basses you see session players use. Or nu-metal cats in general. It’s a different thing.

Q: So is it more like a baritone guitar?

A: It’s the predecessor to the baritone guitar. It’s in the bass register.

Q: Do you feel like playing it had much impact on the record?

A: Oh for sure. Because I write with it. And when you’re writing with it, it gives you a different set of tools to work with. And I exploit them. The way that I play and the way that Stephen and I especially interact because he’s on an eight-string guitar, we do a lot of almost role-swapping. But I’m still an octave below.

Q: Deftones having been around as long as they have, how do you go about getting a set list together at this point?

A: A couple of ways. Things that we play well, that we’re excited about. We send out big-a— master lists to each other of things that we like. Everyone has songs that they’re really excited to play. But there are certain songs you know you’re gonna play.

So once you remove the songs you know you’ve gotta play, you have this other material to work with from an array of albums.

Q: Are you doing much from "Gore"?

A: Currently, not really. Because it’s an hour set. We’re doing usually a song from “Gore.” It’s kind of a smattering of everything. But we’re playing for 65 minutes and we’re almost approaching it more like a festival vibe in the sense that we want to hit people with a shorter set. We’re not really treating it like this is a promotion of the “Gore” album.

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Deftones

When: 6:30 p.m. Sunday, July 9.

Where: Ak-Chin Pavilion, 2121 N. 83rd Ave., Phoenix.

Admission: $30-$69.50.

Details: ticketmaster.com, livenation.com.

Official Deftones afterparty

When: 11 p.m. Sunday, July 9.

Where: Rebel Lounge, 2303 E. Indian School Road, Phoenix.

Admission: $15; $10 in advance.

Details: 602-296-7013, therebellounge.com.

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