Listen: Deftones Unveil Unreleased Song From Shelved Eros

Fans have heard how the Deftones guys had been bouncing back from a period of bad vibes when they began work on their to-be sixth album, Eros. It was their first undertaking since a band meeting in which there was a vote on ending the band, but now they were tight again — and productive only months after the release of Saturday Night Wrist (October 2006). Then bassist Chi Cheng suffered horrible injury in a car accident, never to be heard again.

So Eros was set aside, and for a bunch of reasons: It was too dark to represent them when they so depended on hope. It wasn’t even finished. It could wait. Their lives had suddenly changed; now, that was what bore comment.

But because the Deftones discography boasts what may be music’s highest mean and median, fans were being asked to kiss off a huge deal. Plus, we wanted to hear Cheng’s last recordings — still we hardly suffered: A friend stepped in for Cheng and then two awesome albums followed. But today those albums could feel like overlooked step-children for all the begging about the release of Eros. And oddly, not one iota of Eros proper had been shared with the public, right? (A song from it was played in concert, “Melanie.”) For all we knew, the Eros hard drive had been thrown down a well or something.

That was until Sunday at like 2 pm PT — a year and 12 hours after their Chi shut down for good — when singer Chino Moreno posted “Smile” (below) from Eros on his youtube. This tweet arrived at about the same time:

Chi, We miss you today and everyday. -deftones. https://t.co/M4hGNuAkZf

— chino (@chinomoreno) April 13, 2014

So now we can hear five minutes of Cheng’s last music, a part of a lost album, some of a great band’s rebound from (and conveyance to) despair — on the first anniversary of Cheng’s death and only days after many MS people concluded that Eros is the album most worthy of a price tag of $5 million. A lot of emotions in here! Crank it up!