Hole in the Earth

“Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.”

-Nassim Taleb

“Hole in the Earth” was the lead single from the Deftones’ fifth album, Saturday Night Wrist. Released in September of 2006, it charted nicely enough, peaking at numbers eighteen and nineteen on the Billboard Alternative Songs and Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks charts, respectively. It’s one of my favourites, one of the band’s most revealing, and an example of how an enormous, beautiful alternative metal sound can tell a story about something so ugly.

The writing and recording sessions for Saturday Night Wrist made for a long, drawn out process. Tensions between band members were at an all-time high, most of it being the band versus frontman Chino Moreno over how long the album was taking. He was focusing on his side project, Team Sleep. This Deftones album took nearly three years, and during that time, the band members worked separately. Basically, coming in, recording their parts, and then going home. Moreno wrote “Hole in the Earth” to express his frustration with them, and ponder whether he would stay or leave the group. One lyric in particular stands out:

“I hate all of my friends, they all lack taste sometimes.”

“The song is kind of calling them out on our friendship,” Moreno said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “We’ve been friends for too long and been around each other for too long, so we’ve got to say what we’ve got to say.”

Moreno wasn’t even sure the band would continue at that point, and wrote “Hole in the Earth” as a semi-sort of breakup letter to the band. That being said, the album was finished, and the band would survive and thrive. Moreno would reflect on this state of tension years later, in a 2016 interview with Spin. “In their defence, they probably hated me at that time, too,” he conceded. “At that point, the disconnect was so strong and that record took three years to get finished and basically everybody just came in and did their part and left, including myself.”

A music video was filmed. Directed by Brian Lazzaro, it’s mostly performance-based but still manages to capture the track’s intensity and brooding atmosphere. The shifting lights and supermassive black hole, and the world around Moreno just disappearing, all of it was really well made.

But it wasn’t the end after all. The band kept going, and have made some incredible albums ever since. Imagine that, a song about contemplating an end that ended up being the start of a bolder, stronger version of the band.

“Some things benefit from shocks,” Nassim Taleb says in Antifragile. “They thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty.”

There’s the fragile, the robust, and then the antifragile. I wouldn’t say that the Deftones became stronger because of the stresses faced in some deterministic sense. Rather, the stresses surrounding the Saturday Night Wrist sessions created conditions that birthed some incredible tracks, this single included. Maybe I’m losing perspective, but I think the album makes for a fascinating case study in the antifragile, something that thrives on shocks and stressors.

Interpersonal conflict, disrupted songwriting sessions, different creative interests, recording sessions that dragged on for years — these are the sorts of things that can end a band. I won’t name any, but there are albums of such sessions that have been complete disasters. Saturday Night Wrist ended up being more atmospheric and more brilliant than any album that the band had done before. You could argue they had a formula before, on albums like White Pony and self-titled. Stephen Carpenters guitar riffs, the bass stylings of Chi Cheng, Moreno’s emotionally-laden vocals, Terry Date’s production, and so on. But now, the big riffs gave way to texture, ambience, and restraint. The band had found something new while still being the Deftones, not only keeping themselves going, but setting a direction for future albums to follow, transforming into a timeless act.

That’s what makes “Hole in the Earth” such an incredible single. It has aged brilliantly too, feeling very contemporary to the Gen Z audience. Maybe because they have inherited a world that is fundamentally screwed, and the lyrics of alienation and wanting to disappear really hit close to home. When I saw the band play Rod Laver Arena back in May, this track was included in the setlist, and to say it was well-received would be an understatement.

Twenty years of this track, and it’s become an anthem for the younger generation. I guess that feeling of alienation isn’t tied down to any particular time or place. Plus, the same could be said of any sleeper hit. There are plenty of them in the rock world. But more important than any of that, I could put “Hole in the Earth” on as I go for a walk and it still sounds fresh and exciting. That’s the kind of music that stays in my library for good.

Happy listening to everyone else.