Spoken word album by late Deftones bassist Chi Cheng to be released

Only 200 copies of the 2001 live recording will be released

A spoken word album by late Deftones bassist Chi Cheng will be released in January.

The album, titled ‘The Head Up Project’, was recorded at “a night of poetry, belly dancing, music, insults, alcohol and other forms of flattery”, at the Paris Cafe in Sacramento, California in January 2001.

Only 200 copies of the album will be made available, which are available for pre-order here.

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Cheng, a founding member of the band along with singer Chino Moreno, died in 2013 aged 42. He had been in a “partially conscious state” since a 2008 car accident.

Cheng with Deftones in 2003 CREDIT: DiSanto/WireImage

Cheng’s car accident in 2008 meant that the band abandoned work on their planned sixth record ‘Eros’.

“‘Eros’ was never finished or released due to Chi’s car accident. It was just put away,” frontman Moreno told NME earlier this year. “We needed a change of scenery and a change of everything. I think it really worked for what we needed to do mentally on [2010 album] ‘Diamond Eyes’.”

Asked whether they’d return to the album, Moreno said: “My memory of it is that we were maybe a little over halfway done. There was still a lot of work to do on it. It was still very fragmented.

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“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.”

One track from ‘Eros’, ‘Smile’, was released in 2014 to mark the year anniversary of Cheng’s death before the band gave it a live debut last year.

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