Alt-metal band Deftones, whose frontman Chino Moreno, center, has called Bend home for more than four years, will make its debut at Les Schwab Amphitheater on Tuesday with Rise Against and Thrice. (Frank Maddocks/Submitted photo)

Chino Moreno is ready to find his place in Bend’s 
music scene.

The frontman for alternative hard rock band Deftones has called the city home for more than four years, moving with his family shortly after his wife’s parents obtained a ranch in Tumalo. Like many transplanted residents, he fell in love with Central Oregon’s idyllic mountain and desert scenery and its myriad opportunities for snowboarding, mountain biking and other outdoor activities — not to mention the slower pace of life from Los Angeles, where he lived for about eight years.

“Not that I disliked Los Angeles, but it’s just a great juxtaposition to my life being someone who travels all the time and is in a different city almost every other day, and just the pace of Los Angeles itself,” Moreno said recently from New Orleans while traveling between tour stops. “When I got to Bend, I was really able to decompress from being on tour and everything like that. When you’re home, you’re really home. As I get older, I really just enjoy that. And I have kids, and obviously for a kid — I wish I would have grown up there.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Moreno tries to keep a low profile when he’s home. That might change after Deftones — which Moreno co-founded as a teenager in Sacramento in 1988 with childhood friends Stephen Carpenter (lead guitar), Abe Cunningham (drums) and the late Chi Cheng (bass) — makes its Bend debut Tuesday at Les Schwab Amphitheater on its tour with Rise Against and Thrice.

“I don’t really go out much as far as nightlife and things like that, but there definitely is a music vibe in town, and I would love to expand on that in the future,” Moreno said. “I don’t plan on leaving anytime soon, so I think it would be great to find some people and just sort of jam around town. But like I said, this is my first hometown music stuff, period, doing this show, so yeah, it’ll be exciting. It’s funny because I’ve met so many people living there, and I don’t think a lot of people even know what I do for a living. So, I think it will be kind of fun to see people around town, just like, ‘Oh, I’ve seen you before. Oh, I didn’t know you were in a band.’”

The show has been a long time coming for band, fans and venue alike. LSA was close to booking Deftones last year, but the venue put in its offer too late, director Marney Smith said. The band played Eugene instead. This year, Smith got a hold of Moreno and his wife, and the show deal eventually went through with LSA’s promoter Monqui Presents.

“In my conversations with Chino, (he and his family) love this town, and they love the lifestyle and the people,” Smith said. “It’s home for them.”

The venue doesn’t often book heavier acts such as Deftones or tourmates Rise Against and Thrice, although Smith said it’s a genre she often gets requests for. Previously, when alt-metal act Korn performed in 2007, the amphitheater received complaints about opening band Droid swearing onstage, Smith said. However, she also said she’s received no complaints so far about Deftones being booked.

“They really are that crossover enough of a band, which is why we were willing and excited to take a risk on them,” she said. “And it’s a calculated risk. We know that the fans are going to be over-the-moon excited, and we think that the community will be supportive, as well.”

Moreno also is excited to finally debut in the city he calls home. “Obviously, I’ve been to shows there at the Les Schwab, and I’ve been hyping all my bandmates and everybody about how much they’re going to enjoy the city,” he said.

A few decades ago, it might have made more sense to see Deftones touring with Korn, instead of post-punk acts such as Rise Against. Deftones started out lumped into the nu-metal category with Korn and others in the ’90s. By the release of 2000’s “White Pony,” the band was forging its own path with forays into Cure- and Depeche Mode-inspired atmospherics and Moreno’s provocative, often vague lyrics.

“I feel like by not just sticking to one niche, or deciding, ‘This is what type of band we are, what type of record we’re gonna make,’ and always keeping an open mind in that way, has lent itself … to us to do whatever we feel, whenever we feel like doing it,” Moreno said. “There’s something real freeing to that, whether it’s when we’re making a record or we’re picking tours. … We don’t really feel boxed in by any certain genre. That’s been really nice, but I think it started with us taking our music in broader directions, as opposed to just deciding, ‘Oh, well, we do this well, we’re just gonna continue to do that.’”

The band — also featuring keyboardist Frank Delgado and bassist Sergio Vega of Quicksand — further blurs genre lines on its eighth studio album “Gore,” released in April last year. The album, the group’s third since a car accident left former bassist Cheng paralyzed in 2008 (he eventually died in 2013 of cardiac arrest while in a semi-
comatose state), builds on some of the artier, post-punk sounds found on 2012 predecessor “Koi No Yokan” and 2006’s “Saturday Night Wrist.”

Engineer Matt Hyde, who also worked on “Koi No Yokan,” helped create a more relaxed writing and recording environment for the band, Moreno said. Recording took place in the band’s home base of Los Angeles, with vocals completed at Moreno’s home studio and 
another location just outside Redmond.

“Since we’re all spread out — I’m in Bend, two guys are still in Sacramento, one guy’s in L.A. and one guy’s in New York — for us to get together to write music, we have to plan accordingly,” Moreno said. “… We did these little writing sessions. We’re based out of L.A., so we’d go and meet in L.A. for like 10 days, and we’d write, and then everybody would go back home, and then we’d listen to those ideas, and we’d go back to L.A. for a week — and that’s where Matt lives, so he’d come in there and he’d just record us, record our ideas.”

In past interviews, the band has often talked about recording sessions fraught with conflict (often revolving around the metal-leaning Carpenter and Moreno, who gets credited with writing the band’s more atmospheric guitar parts). But Moreno said the disagreements are just part of the process.

“It’s one of those things where I don’t think people realize even sometimes that we’ve been friends since we were little kids. I’ve known Stephen since I was 10 years old,” Moreno said. “And even when we were kids, we had different opinions and different views and different ways of approaching things. But nothing’s ever as bad to where I just think to myself, ‘Why am I in a band with this dude?’ There’s a reason why we play together. We actually enjoy each other’s company. If we both were coming from the same place always — not even just him and I, but any of us in the band — to me it would seem like the music would be coming from a more linear place. And the fact that we do have opposing views on certain things, I think it keeps it interesting for us to still be making music in our 40s now.”

What: Deftones, Rise Against, with Thrice

When: 6:15 p.m. Tuesday, doors at 5 p.m.

Where: Les Schwab Amphitheater, 344 SW Shevlin Hixon Drive, Bend

Cost: $47.50 plus fees

Contact: bendconcerts.com or 541-312-8510