Album Review: Deftones Balance The Electric and The Ethereal With 'Ohms'

After 32 years, it’s still difficult to box them into any specific genre, but one thing's for certain: there's no one in the industry who sounds like Deftones. On their ninth studio album, Ohms, the alt-metal band unleashes an invigorating jolt of energy to combat the exhaustion of 2020.

Written by Micaela Garza

Metal fans either adore them or despise them; indifference just isn’t an option. This dichotomy has always been the essence of Deftones, reflecting in their music just as much as their public reception. The band’s ninth studio album, Ohms, released on Sept. 25, takes that idea of polarization to the highest voltage while staying true to the distinct brand of shoegaze metal that the band is revered for. The album was cryptically promoted with online messages from the band’s social media accounts: two videos, posted three days apart, reading, “No, you will never find me,” and the coordinates “34º 04’ 42.7”N 118º 21’ 42.2” W.” When followed, the message led to a billboard in Los Angeles picturing the instantly iconic album cover for Ohms, created by long-time art director Frank Moddocks. The image is a callback to the minimalism of the band’s White Pony era, simply featuring a pair of eyes made up of — Moddocks says — 12,995 dots. There’s a hint of mysticism surrounding the album artwork, with a fan theory surmising that the eyes are modeled after a picture of Deftones’ legendary former bassist, the late Chi Cheng. While the band claims this wasn’t purposefully done, drummer Abe Cunningham has openly chatted about the happy accident, stating “they actually laid those eyes on top of there and they match up perfectly. Which is a total coincidence and really kind of trippy though too if you think about it.”

There is, however, a deeper message connected to the album artwork: the band decided to create an “Adopt A Dot” campaign in the days before the release of the album, which allows fans to sponsor a dot on the album cover and send a short message along with it. All proceeds from the campaign are directly donated to the UC Davis Children’s Hospital and the Crew Nation fund, which is dedicated to music industry crew members who have been financially impacted by COVID-19.

The album’s second promotional single “Genesis” starts off the record, beginning with eerie, buzzing synths and plucked arpeggiation of a seventh chord before feedback and drum clicks unleash Chino Moreno’s familiar screams:

“I reject
Both sides of what I'm being told
I've seen right through
Now I watch how wild it gets
I finally achieve
Balance, balance, balance, balance”

This song dives right into a central theme of the album — “balance” — and despite being written prior to the events of 2020, epitomizes the experience of many: trying to find “balance” after life as we once knew it was thrown into collective chaos. Drummer Abe Cunningham pounds out a groovy backbeat on the next track, “Ceremony.” The jam reaches a faux resolution near the two minute mark, but quickly falls back into the groove it began with before ending on repetitive hard hits from every instrument.

Feedback swells into the chug of Stephen Carpenter’s nine-string guitar on “Urantia,” where somehow the group evokes a similar feeling to Sade’s 1985 hit “Smooth Operator,” likely thanks to the melodic, jazzy vocal stylings of Moreno (who previously covered Sade on the band’s 2005 release B-Sides and Rarities). A bionic female voice speaks near the 2:30 mark of the song, a call to the band’s Around The Fur era, on which an almost identical voice is featured during the track “MX” — one of the many easter eggs hidden throughout the album.

“Urantia” is where the lyrical imagery of the album becomes the most vivid: “We crawled in the tomb and release some honey,” Moreno sings, his cryptic, somewhat spiritual story permeating nearly every track. This vague reference to honey makes a continued appearance in the lyrics of the next song, “Error,” with a pre-chorus declaring, “We are gliding above the planes / Dripping honey that prances through our veins.” He draws on biblical context with lines like “Shiny candy / Glowing fruits / Drop from the trees / I watch the serpents writhe beneath” and carries this serpent trope across songs into the lyrics of “The Spell of Mathematics:”

“The snakes come pouring out of your heart
And you know that I can't deny them
So I sink inside where we writhe and create
That feeling that pangs my time with you”

The visual context that Deftones creates for their listeners is just as enticing on this album as it has been on Deftones’ last eight releases, if not proving to be even more thoughtful and magnificent this time around. That, combined with the shoegaze elements they utilize on the album, creates an audial viscerality that nauseates, yet comforts at the same time.

Seventh track “This Link Is Dead” offers Moreno’s most iconic lyrics on Ohms. The poet sings, or rather screams, “I have no patience now / For expectations / Wow” to a similar melody as “Know Your Enemy” — Rage Against The Machine’s treasured collaboration with Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan. Whether this was purposeful or not, it is absolutely epic. This comes right before he simply states, “F-ck this shit, leave me alone.”

Intense yet melodic, “Radiant City” shows major love to metal band Meshuggah, pioneers of the djent sound. Carpenter’s nine-string guitar is most prevalent on this track, with a thick, complex rhythm breaking up moments of intense vocals. At song’s end, Moreno’s screams shift into a softspoken delivery of his classic slant rhyme and incalculable-yet-predictable melodic dissonance: “Whenever I choose to break in again / Promise me now you will follow me in / 'Cause nobody else cuts me the same / You've pulled me into a permanent trance.”

Deftones explore nearly every possible mix of sounds on this album. “Headless” seamlessly combines classic heavy metal sounds and the dreamy, space-headedness of shoegaze. It also has an insanely disorienting key shift that comes with a syncopated drum pattern. From Deftones, fans would expect nothing less.

And back around we come — to the beginning, at the end; back balance, to the titular track, “Ohms.” As the record’s lead single, it’s the song that blue-balled all Deftones fans for a month and got us orgasmically excited for the release of the album. The entire track features lyrics that address “changing times,” “the past,” and “remaining for all time,” and serves as a reflection of what life is right now: being both the question and the answer. It is here that Deftones perfect their dense, yet mellow formula. Moreno put it best when he told NME: “That yin and yang of what we’ve always done of making very brutal music while having these lush overtones and undertones within it is what makes us who we are. We’ve never just been a metal band, we’ve never just been an alternative band, we’ve always just been us. We feel comfortable in never having to choose and let the songs unfold in an organic way.”

Although this album is only 46 minutes long, listening to it feels like an absolute trip — a long trip, with familiar friends who have a lot of wisdom to share after 32 years of making music. It draws on some of the best parts of previous albums, hints to the band’s inspirations, and tells another majestic story to add to the band’s discography. While this year has been chaotic for the collective population of the world, it has also been a spiritual trip for many individuals who searched for stability in a life thrown out of balance. Deftones, however, has always epitomized this dichotomy, and with Ohms, set out to remind us all to reflect on our decisions, find our footing, and remember how ethereal life is in the electric world we live in.

Afterglow ATXOctober 4, 2020