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Credit: Martin Philbey/Redferns
Deftones’ 2006 album Saturday Night Wrist was made in tumultuous circumstances. The band split from longtime producer Terry Date early in the sessions, and singer Chino Moreno clashed with his replacement, veteran Alice Cooper/Kiss studio guru Bob Ezrin – a situation not helped by the frontman’s battle with substance abuse.
By contrast, the atmosphere had completely shifted when Deftones convened in 2007 to write what would be their sixth album. In 2008, they revealed that the title of the record they were working on would be Eros, and that it would be released early the following year. They even premiered a new track, Melanie, during live shows in September 2008.
“We were getting along so well during the Eros sessions,” Chino told The independent in 2016. “It’s like the music actually was even taking a backseat to our friendships. We’d go into the studio, and we were way into playing the board game Risk at the time, so we’d set up this elaborate game of Risk that would last for weeks at a time. Terry Date was producing that record and he’d come in and be like, ‘C’mon guys, let’s get to work’ and we’d be like, ‘One more game.’ We were having so much fun together as friends and reconnecting – then during those sessions is when Chi had his accident.”
On November 4, 2008, bassist Chi Cheng was involved in a car crash in Santa Clara, California, when the vehicle he was travelling in hit another car and flipped three times. The accident left the bassist in a coma.
Understandably distraught, the rest of the band abandoned work on Eros. According to Chino, they had recorded 11 or 12 songs, among them Smile, Trempest, Dallas, Destiny and Melanie (sone of the titles apocryphally named after strippers).
“Musically it’s probably 75-80% done and lyrically it was about halfway there, but honestly, I wasn’t too happy with the material we had,” Chino told The Independent in 2016. “Some of the music was lacking a little bit. I had faith it was going to come together and be great in the end, but we never got to that point.”
With Chi still in a coma, Deftones gradually returned to touring, with former Orange 9mm bassist Sergio Vega standing in. The latter appeared on the band’s next two albums, 2010’s Diamond Eyes and 2012’s Koi No Yokan. Neither featured any of the material written during the aborted Eros sessions.
Tragically, Chi never woke from his coma. He passed away on April 13, 2013. His death put paid to the idea of revisiting the Eros sessions.
“Once Chi had his accident, everything came to a halt with the Eros sessions, so the idea of going back to that batch of songs, finishing them and have Sergio learn Chi’s parts just hasn’t felt like something that we’re interested in doing,” Chino said in 2016. “If the record were finished and we were just sitting on it, we probably would have put it out by now, maybe even given it away, just so that people can hear it, but it would take a lot more work to get it done.”
One song from the Eros sessions has been released. To mark the first anniversary of Chi’s death, Chino uploaded Smile, the only completed song, to YouTube. The track was swiftly taken down by Deftones’ label, but it remains a tantalising glimpse of what could have been.
Will Eros ever see the light of day? In 2017, Deftones drummer Abe Cunningham suggested that it might.
“If anything at all, I see some tracks from it coming out in some form or another,” he told Overdrive. “There is some really fucking bad-ass stuff on that album, but also stuff that’s not that good in my opinion. We know that there is interest in the album from the die-hards but I’m sure we will do the right thing at the right time with it… it’s something that could surface in the coming years.”
But that hasn’t happened yet. And if Chino Moreno is to be believed, it seems unlikely that it ever will.
“It would take basically going in and finishing it,” the singer told Uproxx in 2020. “Emotionally heavy. Just because it’s the last thing that Chi played on. Not saying that we won’t do it, but we haven’t made any plans any time in the near future to do so.”