Deftones broke out unreleased ‘Eros’ rarity ‘Melanie’ for the first time in nearly two decades at this year’s Dia De Los Deftones. Check it out below.
The alt-metal icons broke out the song this weekend (Saturday November 7) as they headlined their Dia De Los Deftones festival at Petco Park in San Diego, California.
This year marked the seventh instalment of the annual event, which sees them curate two stages with an eclectic mix of genres, as well as host art installations, local vendors and exclusive merch. Over the years, they have lined-up performances from the likes of Turnstile, Clipse, Doechii, Megan Thee Stallion, Doja Cat, 2Hollis, Knocked Loose, Gojira, IDLES, Ecca Vandal, Future and more.
Closing the 2026 edition with a 20-song headline set, Chino Moreno and co. broke out the usual fan favourites including ‘My Own Summer (Shove It)’, ‘Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away)’ and more, but also surprised fans with a song they haven’t played live since 2008.
That song was the rarely played ‘Melanie’, which they wrote for the 2008 album ‘Eros’ – an LP that Deftones were recording at the time their late bassist Chi Cheng was involved in a car crash in 2008. He remained in a semi-comatose state for several years, and so the group decided to shelve the album and start fresh with fill-in bassist Sergio Vega, eventually returning with ‘Diamond Eyes’ in 2010.
Cheng passed away in 2013 and ‘Eros’ has remained unreleased. In 2014, on the one-year anniversary of Cheng’s death, Moreno shared a studio version of ‘Smile’, the only track to ever be liberated from the album, and they only played it live in 2019.
At Dia De Los Deftones 2026, they have played ‘Melanie’ from that record for the first time since 2008, and the frontman told the audience afterwards that “This song doesn’t exist”.
The band have yet to say anything more about why they reintroduced the song back into the set after so long, although it does come after outlets including Stereogum and The PRP reported that a leak of the unreleased album surfaced online earlier this summer, alongside demos of their ‘Ohms’ album.
While the ‘Eros’ album has remained largely under wraps for years now, Moreno did reveal to NME back in 2020 that he was open to one day finishing the album as “an experiment’.
“‘Eros’ was never finished or released due to Chi’s car accident. It was just put away,” the frontman said. “We needed a change of scenery and a change of everything. I think it really worked for what we needed to do mentally on ‘Diamond Eyes’.”
“We talked a little about the ‘Eros’ stuff [with Terry Date]. Once everything shut down, the hard drives were put away. My memory of it is that we were maybe a little over halfway done,” he continued. “There was still a lot of work to do on it. It was still very fragmented. The question that we’re always asked is, ‘Are you ever going to put that record out?’ Honestly, it would be like making a whole other record – except I would be trying to write lyrics to songs that are over 10 years old.”
He concluded: “To do that with every song and then write from that place, it’s emotional. There are a lot of things tied to that album. It would be interesting to [finish] at some point, and I’ve never said that we won’t. There are times when I think that it would be an experiment that I can possibly learn from.”
Other artists who performed at Dia De Los Deftones this year included The Neighbourhood, AFI, Bktherula, Converge, Jehnny Beth, Ladrones, Lip Critic, and LustSickPuppy.
Deftones released their 10th studio album ‘Private Music’ last summer, which NME awarded the full five stars and said: “Very much a whole journey through a full-bodied and expansive fever dream, but this time somehow spiritual, intimate and direct, Deftones’ 10th album is a gift for fans old, new, and certainly finding them in the very distant future. Their peers can’t touch them.”
It was later named as one of NME’s albums of 2025, while its epic single ‘Milk Of The Madonna’ also made our Top 50 Songs of 2025 list.
The post Watch Deftones play unreleased ‘Eros’ rarity ‘Melanie’ for first time since 2008 at Dia De Los Deftones: “This song doesn’t exist” appeared first on NME.
