Extreme energy, uncompromising sensitivity and the entire impact of five musicians who take back no emotion or emotion. With a sound that broke ground for an entire genre, but does not meet the standards of any category, but consistently and unwaveringly goes its own way. No matter how abundant the epigones may be, the DEFTONES are unique and unmatched. No metal, no matter how nu, no punk, no hard rock, but a hybrid of all that - the DEFTONES don't follow anyone, they lead the way. The proof is called Deftones and is the fourth album of the band from Sacramento. Four million Deftones albums in eight years found their way to the fans, three million fans found their way to the DEFTONES' concerts. They took their time: For years (since their founding in 1988) DEFTONES toured with combos such as Bad Brains, Korn, L7, Ozzy Osbourne and Quicksand before they threw their debut Adrenaline on a hungry market in 1995. This was followed in 1997 by Around The Fur, a pure DEFTONES album in full heaviness, which was produced by Terry Date (White Zombie, Soundgarden, Pantera) like its predecessor. After that, the sound was increased: DEFTONES were one of the first bands from the hard rock genre to include a permanent turntable / keyboarder / sample specialist in the band: Frank Delgado has provided additional sonority since White Pony (2000), which gave the brute force of the DEFTONES another dimension. The decision proved to be a wise one: White Pony easily reached platinum status in the USA and was awarded a Grammy, in Germany the album reached number 11 and spat out the singles Change (In The House Of Flies) and Back To School. The surprisingly direct title Deftones stands for the core of what the DEFTONES deliver on the album: On the one hand, solid DEFTONES material that makes them unmistakable and gives them great recognition value, on the other hand, another step into the abysses of soundmerging. A track like Hexagram attacks the auditory nerve with massive guitar fronts and a broken structure that has its roots deep in hardcore and hurls far into the endless space of transparent textures. The path leads into the undergrowth, into the edginess of emotional depth, which opens up in the violent breaks in the song structure. Not much different Minerva, which forms a seemingly thoroughly harmonious structure, but which is interspersed with emergency brakes that cause the soundwalls to collapse due to sudden moments of calm. A roller coaster of pulsations that hardly allows a moment to take a breath. Songs like Good Morning Beautiful and Battleaxe erupt no less massively - an eternal cycle between tension and relaxation, contraction and expansion, stability and collapse. Sign of the inexhaustible power of the DEFTONES. And indeed, after months of touring, the DEFTONES suffered less from exhaustion than from overheating: "We couldn't sit still," says Stephen. " While we were on tour, a lot of creative steam had been created. You can't just turn that off. We tried to relax and live like ordinary citizens, but it didn't work. We had forgotten how to do it." "We tried for three months," Chino interjects. "Then we got bored, we wrote songs and hung out in our studio, The Spot. And we knew that something was in the making." Working in the studio is like being on tour for us," explains Abe Cunningham. "We have the same focus, the same energy. It had been three years since White Pony and we were under a lot of pressure for the follow-up. We ignored that. We felt when the time had come." In the summer of 2002, the recordings began at The Spot, again together