In 2006, Deftones released their 5th studio album Saturday Night Wrist, a record that nearly broke the band.
The sessions for Wrist began in 2004, then the band took a year-long break in 2005, scrapped many of the recordings and ended up piecing the final album together via parts being sent across emails.
In 2007, Deftones worked out their issues and start recording together as a full unit, hoping to rekindle the dynamics of what made the band successful in the first place.
Chino Moreno told Billboard in May 2007, "We're going in there and playing as five of us in the room with just our instruments, no other distractions. That's how we started out, basically, when we first started the band – us in the garage, no ProTools or anything to get us ahead of ourselves."
The band recorded about 5 or so songs for the album which had the working title of Eros.
But tragedy struck in 2008, when bassist Chi Cheng was involved in a serious car accident which left him in a coma. The band put a halt on the new album, and eventually would restart recording for what would later become Diamond Eyes, enlisting the help of Sergio Vega from the band Quicksand for bass duties.
Cheng slowly began showing signs of improvement, becoming partially conscious at one point, but later died on April 14, 2013.
Moreno gave fans a glimpse of Eros in 2014, sharing the song "Smile" to social media before it was pulled for copyright infringement even though the song was never officially released.
In 2013, Chino said in an interview that he was confident that Eros would in fact be released. But just last year, in 2016, he rebutted the statement in an interview with Independent, saying, "I had faith it was going to come together and be great in the end, but we never got to that point... If the record were finished and we were just sitting on it, we probably would have put it out by now... it's probably 75-80% done and lyrically it was about halfway there, but honestly, I wasn't too happy with the material we had."
Another track, titled "Dallas" appeared in instrumental form on the band's website but has since been removed. Thanks to the power of YouTube, it can be seen being played in the video below.
Judging by the not-quite-complete sound of "Smile" and "Dallas" only being heard in instrumental form, it's a good guess that perhaps Eros isn't as finished as it seems.
The band has released three albums after work on Eros was halted. So it's quite possible some of the elements of songs from Eros found their way into the more recent music.
Top Photo Credit: Reprise Records/iHeartMedia Artist Image Library