Ohms

It is wonderful to once again hear a Deftones record as heavy as molten lead, as furious as an enraged honey badger.

Deftones have only ever produced good albums, but they’ve also spent the decade since Diamond Eyes exploring textures and soundscapes, sometimes at the expense of songcraft. Ohms breaks that trend, with more focused songs, and a renewed love of hard-rocking guitar riffs that may rekindle the band’s relationship with fans that jumped ship after White Pony.

In terms of epic grandeur, though, Ohms somehow surpasses even the band's most ambitious middle-period work. If past albums in the Deftones discography defined key points in the story of your life, you can expect to be thoroughly engrossed by the latest chapter in a remarkable musical journey that, against all the odds, just got more compelling.

This record is just as unique and innovative as each album before it. It's truly and honestly a breath of fresh air, it's just once again under the helm of the producer who fleshed out their unmistakable and haunting sound in the first place.

A dizzying display of a band at peak performance.

A masterclass in grandiose ferocity, the album harks back to the urgency of their early days and collides with the expansive melodies that underpinned much of their more recent output. Although on the surface the most aligned to their turn-of-the-century sound, ‘Ohms’ is filled with the twisted flourishes and unexpected juxtapositions that have guided the band’s lengthy career.

Less antagonistic than Gore and wandering down considerably fewer stylistic avenues than Koi No Yokan, Ohms plays instead like a spiritual successor to Diamond Eyes. Like that record, the production is polished enough to see your face in, and like that record, there’s a sense that the arrangements are being granted plenty of room to breathe.

Ohms is the first Deftones record to feel entirely like all of the rest but also like none of them. It somehow manages to push the band into a new direction while leaving breadcrumbs from each album. With a wide range of enjoyment coming from each cut, Ohms further cements Deftones as the premier mainstream rock band to reinvent themselves every decade.

It's at times crushingly heavy, but there's a cerebral knottiness to the arrangements, and Chino Moreno's vocal boasts a windswept melancholy harking back to the new romantics. [Dec 2020, p.29]

Arguably, Ohms is at first blush nothing new for Deftones. What it is is an engrossing refinement of what they’ve become over years of risk-taking and experimentation.

Ohms is a gigantic undertaking that is fit for a band with even bigger ambitions. At this point in their career, Deftones have nothing to prove to anyone but themselves. Their latest work of art is simply a reminder of their greatness.

While some fans will always have their favourite Deftones album (White Pony being the most popular), it’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish what their best album is, especially when they’re in form as hot as this.

Ohms is instantly familiar without replicating anything they’ve done before.

An intriguing addition to the band’s canon.

It’s emotive, heavy, satisfying. It’s Deftones. They’ve made their album again and, honestly, you wouldn’t have it any other way.

A must-listen for those who like their metal with depth and mystery.

For Deftones, finding the sweet spots between compromise and balance, factoring in each member’s duties and creative inputs may be a more appropriate way of assessing the delicacy of the task at hand. It’s within that push and pull, that the aptly-named, tension-charged Ohms proves itself a fascinating entry into the band’s canon.

They’re not attempting to radically shift your notion of what their music can be. For those of us who have stuck around, that’s just fine; a Deftones album that effortlessly twists their familiar components into a few genuinely new shapes is plenty exciting.