This new Deftones song is gnarly perfection

Your Sunday soundtrack has arrived ...

Back in March, I had a pretty sweet weekend away planned. (I’ve written about my unemployed summer of schlepping my way around every music festival I could get my hands on already.) But this was the full stop, the exclamation point, the weekend to end all weekends, one final fling before hunkering down for the winter.

On Thursday afternoon, I was supposed to spend four hours driving down to my happy place, New Plymouth, to spend three days at Womad, a music festival that lets you carry a chilly bin full of food and beers in with you, set up camp on an idyllic grassy hillside, and settle in for three days of summer perfection.

On the Sunday, I was going to drive home early and head to Trusts Arena in West Auckland, a venue literally five minutes from house. It was all planned out: I would have arrived at godawful nearby bar The Hangar for a few drinks around 7.30pm, left to get into the venue about 8.30pm, then prepared for 90 minutes of tense, dense alt-metal courtesy of Sacramento skull crushers Deftones.

For reasons I don’t need to go into, none of that happened.

Instead, I stayed home. I’m still home. Thanks to Lockdown: Part II, I’m still in my track pants, still bingeing too much TV, still watching too many movies, still buying too many bags of pre-popped popcorn, still letting the kids eat too many snacks, and generally not living my best life.

YOLO. You don’t see that hashtag much these days.

Anyway, on Friday, something arrived that cheered me up no end. A new Deftones single, from a new Deftones album. It’s called Ohms, and holy wow it’s good. It’s the best possible kind of Deftones song: intense, unpredictable, knotty and gnarly. It’s a head-banging tribute to these brutal end times.

It’s good. So good. The video has creepy hands and giant wolves and grim lighting and red robes billowing into the breeze. Best of all, this is the song Deftones chose to end their next album, also called Ohms, due out on September 25. Imagine what the rest of the record is like.

Anyway, go listen to it again, then we can talk some more …

Look, you could spend your weekend listening to the new album from The Killers, which just received a whopping five stars from NME. You might want to check out the latest full-lengther from the criminally underrated Long Beach act Cold War Kids. Or there’s a new one from Nas, who’s always worth listening to.

This new song from Pharrell and Jay-Z sure is pretty damned dope too.

There are still best-of-the year albums by Phoebe Bridges, Waxahatchee, Princess Nokia and Moses Sumney still rattling around in my brain, waiting to be played again, deserving of some musical unpacking, some mental unravelling.

But right now, this Deftones track maps my mindstate exactly. It’s brutal, meloncholy, angry, frustrated, yelling-into-the-abyss perfection. It slaps. It slays. “It’s a dichotomy of reflecting on negative things, but coming out of it optimistic,” front man Chino Moreno recently told NME.

Basically, it sounds like hope, and we all need a bit of that right now. I can’t wait to see it played live. Whenever that might be.

Fuck I hope it’s soon.