Crosses initially surfaced as the trio of Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno, Far guitarist Shaun Lopez, and bassist Chuck Doom. The band put out three EPs between 2011 and 2014 that culminated in their debut self-titled album in 2014, and then there was a whole lot of silence. Eventually after two covers in 2020 and 2021, Crosses began dropping new material like "Initiation" and "Protection," as well as the upcoming Permanent.Radiant EP.
Though if you've seen any photos of Crosses lately, you'll notice Doom isn't there. In an interview with Kerrang!, Moreno and Lopez reveal they've split with the bassist and that Doom was largely the reason there was no new Crosses for a long time..
"To be honest, and without being dramatic or bad mouthing people, as it went on, me and Chuck just… He was going this way, I was going that way, and Chino was caught in the middle," said Lopez. "I think Chuck wanted to do his solo thing and involve Chino, which kind of meant he wanted to do Crosses without me. Which is just fucking comedy. If I'm gonna get on my Liam Gallagher vibe for a minute (laughs) it's like, 'Come on, bro, are you kidding me?' Anytime I would get together with Chuck to make some new tunes, something had seriously changed in the vibe.
"A close friend of mine was even like, 'Why aren't you doing Crosses? I just figured you and Chino were beefing?' I'm like, 'No, dude.' It was a bummer because the whole reason this stopped for that many years is because of one person and that one person isn't in Crosses now."
Moreno also weighed in on the situation, saying it wasn't an easy decision to part ways with Doom, and that he was essentially the middleman between Doom and Lopez as they continued to fight.
"It was a really tough thing. It wasn't a decision we made, like, 'We want to do this without Chuck.' He just really wasn't present, he had other projects he was taking more interest in. There were two options: either we don't do it at all, or we try it with just us two. We chose the latter. Mine and Chuck's friendship has suffered because of that, sadly, because I love that dude. I appreciate him as a musician, and as a friend. Hopefully, we work that out at some point.
"Shaun and his relationship had been fractured for quite some time before all this. My job wasn't just to be creative anymore. For lack of a better word, I was 'refereeing' the writing project. That wasn't fun at all. I could have fun making music with Chuck, I could have fun making music with Shaun, but making music together became like pulling teeth. That's not the reason we started doing this. That's probably as deep as I'll go into that. It's pretty self-explanatory."
It's definitely great to have Crosses back in the fold these days, but yeah – one listen to the new stuff and it's clearly a little different than it was in the previous decade. Which isn't a bad thing! Both iterations of Crosses are very good. It just sucks to hear the reason Crosses is what they are now is because of internal issues.
