Abe Cunningham and Chino Moreno from the Deftones dropped by to chat with KROQ’s Nicole Alvarez while backstage at this year’s Coachella festival -- one of the more surprising additions to the epic, two-weekend line up. “We were asked, I guess that's the quickest, easiest answer I got,” says Chino. “I don't think we expected it either," Abe adds. “It was honestly the first time we were asked to do it,” Chino says. “In the beginning, we weren't quite sure if we were or not -- and it was kind of last minute that we just pulled the trigger.”

Looking back on the band after spending decades making music together, Chino admits, “it's weird with our career. it's such a slow build. It still feels like we're still building for some crazy reason after 30 years. I've never felt like one day just like I woke up and went like, ‘wow,’ because it's been so gradual.”

“When I do look back in retrospect, I mean, it's crazy. [Abe] and I talk about it all the time, you know, we've known each other since the seventh grade,” he explains, “when we were just little kids skateboarding behind the school getting in trouble… It's crazy to think back that we're here now and still doing it after all these years.”

“I don't know if there's an end goal,” Chino continues. “I think the consistency and always trying to expand a little bit musically… We've been making music, like I said, since we were kids and, you would think at some point we would run out of ideas, but it's weird. We get together and we just start making sounds and everybody gets excited.”

“I think time too,” Abe adds. “Time is a trip because we started in 1988 man. You know, had a record deal in the early nineties and stuff. Just the fact that there's been a lot of growing at that time, you know, there's been many, many ups and downs. There's been great highs and you know, really, really, really sunken deep lows too. But it's kind of a trip -- we're just kind of chipping away. We go home, we take breaks now and it's not this constant grind anymore.”

Deftones’ ninth studio album, Ohms was released in 2020, and although the band hasn’t spoken much about its follow-up, there are now rumblings of something on the horizon. "We've just sort of been working on and off over the last year and a half from when we started writing,” says Chino. "Basically, where we're sitting right now is we have a whole record recorded all musically. And it's pretty much my job right now to finish up the vocals.”

"I have, obviously, this show again next week, and then straight after that, I go back home to Oregon and I go in the studio,” he explained. "So as long as that takes. I hate to put a definite kind of timeframe… we're not really in a rush. We want it to be great. I think that's most important. But it is coming and it's really good. We're really excited with what we've been working on. Overall, it's an invigorated kind of sound. We hadn't written a record since what was it, pre-COVID, I think, when we were last in the studio.”

He continues, “We've been playing shows, but we hadn't really got into being creative. The creative part, to me, is always kind of the funnest part of being in this band. Performing is great, but coming up with something out of nothing, that feeling cannot be topped.

"And so when you get in the room with your friends, we're laughing, we're having fun and then someone does something and then I react to it or they react to what I'm doing, it goes in a circle and then, all of a sudden, we lift our heads up and there's something that exists that didn't exist before we walked in that room.”

Words by Joe CIngrana Interview by Nicole Alvarez