✦✦✦✧ If you’re a Deftones fan, this album offers tantalizing glimpses of near greatness. It’s the first time in 17 years that the band have worked with the great Terry Date, and their combined production choices yield very listenable, if not always straightforward, sonic decisions. Those choices just contribute to an overall sense of the band now being so post-meta that us listeners are just going to have to play catchup.

✦✦✧✧ Deftones continue their descent into becoming a post-metal Team Sleep/††† soundscape band. Very boring, by all measures (even the usually stellar Abe Cunningham lets his drums fade back on this album). The closest you’ll get to satisfaction on here is the track “Doomed User,” but otherwise the best thing I can see is that is probably a great album with which to test stadium sound systems.