By Jamil Oakford/editor-in-chief

Deftones have proved with its newest album Gore that after nearly 30 years in music, the band is still both relevant and willing to evolve.

The effort displayed across the entire album is refreshing in a genre where bands are tripping over themselves to have the most insightful/complex lyrics. Deftones stayed relatively pure in sound.

Gore is that album many listeners patiently waited for. It delivers lyrics that on the surface seem pretty simple and easy to digest, but upon digestion, challenge the listener to stop and reassess what was said. The best example is the highly charged and metaphor-packed lyrics on “Geometric Headdress.” The craftsmanship used to explain an explicit point about an intimate moment between the narrator and a woman is simply masterful. The almost worship-like language that concludes the song gives this track a bit of depth that’s hard to flippantly overlook.

On top of a lyrically intriguing album, Deftones delivers a valuable lesson that many new artists can learn from: evolution.

Even if they’ve tweaked their sound considerably, maybe as a way to prove the band isn’t just a stick-in-the-mud, non-evolving entity, their content still sounds very much like a Deftones sound.

For example, “Prayers/Triangles” offers listeners a somewhat different side of Deftones’ sound. It offers an atmospheric tone at the beginning, the music guiding the listener through a very mellow opener, and somehow, somewhere in the middle, the track picks up and the listener may think it a brand new song that somehow works in tandem with the first.

It’s a cohesive album that seems to display duality between atmospheric sound and raw energy, one that works well with the initial Deftones sound. If listeners are looking for a break in the monotonous rock genre, Gore will give them that in spades.