Huck #021 Steps Out!

The new issue of Huck has walked out into the world. And this time around, we’ve let a global rock force take centre stage.

Sacramento’s Deftones have risen from skater kid obscurity to become one of the most celebrated bands lumped with the alt rock tag. Over the two decades it took to get here, they’ve overcome tension, tragedy and the vices of success. And now, at the dawn of a new album, they’re suddenly standing tall.

Earlier this year, we sent photographer Mustafah Abdulaziz and writer Tom Bryant to catch up with Deftones in Los Angeles as they were about to embark on a mammoth world tour, and despite the noticeable absence of their bassist and best friend Chi Cheng (who remains seriously injured in hospital following a car crash in late 2008) the band’s optimism was palpable.

The interview was open and honest. The photographs blew us away. So after a painstaking picture editing process, we decided it was only fair and right to share the images that didn’t make it into the mag by creating a digital-edition of our favourite outtakes.

Back in the main mag, however, the stories continued to roll out in print. Cover stars Deftones became masters of their own zeitgeist and revealed the myriad of influences they bring to their collective sound. We ventured to South Africa and found a side of the Rainbow Nation football fans fail to see; took a wild ride through history and realised Thrash Metal is far from dead; and got to grips with Roller Derby, where riot grrrls on roller skates are as raucous as all hell.

It got heavy when we found plastic pollution is slowly suffocating our seas. It lightened up when we snooped through skating oddball Michael Sieben’s weird and wonderful things. And it felt like a new beginning, when photographer Spencer Murphy came back from The O’Neill Cold Water Classic in Tasmania with the first instalment of our year-long creative brief. After being asked to interpret simple captions any way he liked, he returned with an edit of images that once again blew our minds. So what did we do? You guessed it; we gathered them together and wished them a fond farewell then sent them out into the world in their own online ‘zine.

Because that’s the problem with mags, you see; once you’ve made one, you just wanna make more.