Some American

Song Of The Day | Deftones - You’ve Seen The Butcher 

I think that the Deftones are the Radiohead of metal. I’m serious. I know, I never would have thought that a band who were mentioned in the same breath as KoRn and Limp Bizkit throughout the mid and late nineties would be capable of producing anything worthwhile either. But they have been for over a decade now.

Starting with the seminal White Pony, the difficult third album masterpiece, and moving to their more recent Saturday Night Wrist, which was my favorite metal album in a year that included Mastodon’s Blood Mountain, the band has created some of the most atmospheric and evocative music in the metal genre. By consistently borrowing stylistic elements from the best of hardcore, prog, and electronica, the Deftones make music that is at once accessible, dense, familiar, and entirely inimitable. 

“You’ve Seen The Butcher” is the fourth track from Diamond Eyes, the band’s newly released sixth record and their first without bassist Chi Cheng, who has been in a coma since the car accident that derailed the sessions for the band’s unreleased Eros album. While I do feel it represents the album as a whole, with it’s rhythmic structure and its emphasis on the damaged crooning of Chino Moreno, choosing a single song to play out of context was a difficult task. 

Diamond Eyes was released May 4 on Reprise Records.