Deftones: Diamond Eyes version on CD in Standard edition. This particular edition was published in Europe in publishing company Reprise Records on 4. May 2010.

"Beautiful" is how DEFTONES singer and guitarist Chino Moreno describes the new DEFTONES album Diamond Eyes in an interview. "We have no problem being beautiful." Beautiful is a term that a normal rock band with hard riffs would hardly use, but DEFTONES are not a "normal" hard rock band after all. They were schooled on Anthrax, The Smiths, Pantera and The Cure as kids, skateboarded and rode "Smurfs", and after high school they mixed trip hop with thrash in a band format, melodic vocals with debauched echoes and yes, beautiful with ugly. They crossed genre boundaries and mocked the simplistic pigeonholing of the iPod à la "heavy metal", "hard rock" and "alternative". This is what made them some of the stars and headliners of the charts. But DEFTONES have held together throughout their complicated career and now present one of their best albums. For Diamond Eyes, packed with songs, is just that: an album from start to finish, just like the good old days: each song takes you a little further away from your everyday life until you arrive at a place that's much better than the one you left. But there's one more fact that makes Diamond Eyes special in the DEFTONES canon: the band recorded the album after their best friend and bassist Chi Cheng suffered a severe brain injury in a car accident in November. "After Chi's accident, nothing would have been easier than to make a sad album," Moreno explains. "It was like a cloud was hanging over us, so we set out to create something uplifting. I think that's why there's a lot of fantasy on the album. I tried to keep everyday problems out of the themes of the songs and make everything a little more abstract, a little more artistic. It might sound strange, but this is a really upbeat album." And quite spontaneously at that. Diamond Eyes was six months in the making with the help of former Quicksand bassist Sergio Vega and producer Nick Raskulinecz (Foo Fighters, Alice In Chains, Rush). Remarkably, DEFTONES had just recorded a full-length album called Eros, which they eventually shelved. "To be honest, I knew something better was coming," confirms Chino. Starting from scratch was a bold decision for a band that takes a long time to make each album. Drummer Abe was initially skeptical about the decision, especially since recording an album has always been extremely difficult in the past: "Each of the previous albums was like pulling a tooth, or worse, like surgery without anesthesia," he muses. "But this time we just said, 'screw it, we're still best friends, all of us. And we can still do it. So we encouraged each other, got creative and fired all the guns."

Album spans genres Alternative rock, Shoegaze and Alternative Metal.