On a warm August afternoon inside Atomic Records, a no-frills music store tucked in a Burbank, Calif., shopping strip, the five members of Deftones carried armloads of vinyl to the register.
Abe Cunningham, the drummer, rifled through a thick stack: the Residents, Prince, the Pretenders. Frank Delgado, who plays keyboards and turntables, walked out with Kraftwerk’s “Neon Lights” and an album from Alice Coltrane. The frontman Chino Moreno picked up a record he’d never heard of, drawn to a fierce-looking Roman soldier on the sleeve, and rattled off some of his favorites from different eras: Danzig’s self-titled debut, Morrissey’s “Viva Hate,” anything Cocteau Twins.
The picks might have seemed surprising for a band considered the vanguard of the late-90s nu metal movement. But Deftones’ eclectic tastes have proven to be the key to the band’s longevity. Where peers like Limp Bizkit and Mudvayne hewed to chunky metal, syncopated rhythms and rap-rock fusion, Deftones pursued elements of shoegaze, post-punk and new wave, underpinned with an instinct for pulsing alternative metal.
“We’ve always tried to stray away from boxing ourselves into any one certain sound,” Moreno, 52, said. “We made music for us, based on all the influences we like. And those influences really vary.”
The path has been anything but easy. Addiction, writer’s block, the death of a band member — “every cliché you can imagine,” Moreno said in an interview at the record store last week, sitting with his bandmates atop wooden record crates in between the aisles of old vinyl.
But the group has stuck it out, and is thriving. On Friday, Deftones will release their 10th album, “Private Music,” filled with shimmering melodies, glitchy synths and Moreno’s soaring vocals interspersed with Stephen Carpenter’s muscular, down-tuned guitar riffs.
The sound is familiar, but the audience receiving it may be somewhat new. Fueled by social media, an embrace of early millennial nostalgia and a shoegaze renaissance, young people have been discovering Deftones’ catalog for the first time.
A black-and-white photo of four men examining vinyl albums at a record shop.
“Our records take a decade to actually develop,” Carpenter said. “We’ll put it out, and then 10 years later is when it does what you think it would’ve did when it first came out.”Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York Times
“Their sound has always comprised the essentials,” said George Clarke, the lead singer of the metal revisionists Deafheaven, who said he first encountered Deftones from a music video on his grandmother’s television when he was a teenager in the 2000s. “Now, when I go back and listen to their old records 20 years later, I’m hearing all these new sounds because I’ve developed into a more intelligent listener.”
Delgado, 54, attributes at least some part of the renewed interest to the immediate availability of the band’s work in the internet age. “Back in the day, you’d have to dig hard to find stuff, go to record stores, sit in listening stations, ask the guy behind the counter what to buy,” he said.
The revival has drawn new kinds of fans to shows, including young women, moving beyond the Dude Rock crowd that typified the early nu metal scene.
Deftones have “a level of harmonic complexity that feels very emotional, and that you don’t really hear in metal music,” Willow Smith, the singer and actress who has covered two early Deftones’ songs, said in an email, calling the group “extremely inspirational.” “There’s a beautiful femininity and longing in Chino’s performance that just underscores and accentuates that very complexity.”
Deftones’ roots run deep through Sacramento, Calif., well back into the ’80s when Moreno and Cunningham went to the same high school and connected with Carpenter through the local skater scene. Carpenter’s influences ran heavy — Anthrax, Slayer, Metallica — while Moreno dabbled in new wave. Cunningham took cues from the Police and the Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell. They recruited the bassist Chi Cheng, an outgoing hippie type who embraced reggae and funk.
The band quickly became a mainstay of the Sacramento rock club circuit and skate scene. Its debut album, “Adrenaline” (1995), was straightforwardly aggressive, with songs like “7 Words” and “Bored” showcasing Carpenter’s jagged guitar and Moreno’s confrontational lyrics. Nu metal was solidifying as breakout albums from Korn, Incubus and Limp Bizkit got regular rotation over the airwaves and on MTV.
But it was Deftones’ 1997 album, “Around the Fur,” that catapulted the group to experimental standout status. Songs like “My Own Summer” melded Moreno’s breathy, whispered vocals with his signature shrieks, while Cheng’s wandering bass lines moved up from the background to complement, rather than undergird, Carpenter’s heavy riffs.
Breaking away from the nu metal pack was a risk — but it paid off. “That remains one of my favorite records, and after the reception we came off it with all this confidence that we could do whatever we want,” Moreno said. “We didn’t have any boundaries — we were just so invigorated.”
On “Saturday Night Wrist” (2006), the group genre hopped even further. Delgado chopped turntablism and glitch-core synths with Cunningham’s snare-heavy jazz drumming; Moreno’s dreamy vocals echoed the elusive lyricism of Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan and the melodic mopiness of the Cure’s Robert Smith. (Gahan, by the way, is a fan: “Chino and the Deftones have transcended time, and pushed their own creative boundaries,” he said in an email.)
Then the band members’ freewheeling rocker lifestyle caught up with them. Some went through substance abuse and divorce. Moreno hit challenges writing “Saturday Night Wrist,” and his confidence was further shaken when the label tried pairing him with songwriters.
“It was like watching an episode of ‘Behind the Music,'” Moreno joked, referencing the VH1 documentary series known for exploring bands wracked with drama.
Tragedy struck in 2008 as the band was in the middle of recording “Eros,” what was supposed to be Deftones’ sixth album. Cheng was critically injured in a car accident and left comatose, shattering the band and throwing its future into question. “Eros” was shelved, never to be released. The bassist died in 2013.
“Chi’s passing put things in perspective for us in a way that we try not to take any of this for granted,” Moreno said. Cunningham, 54, nodded along solemnly. “We’re lucky to have each other,” the drummer added.
The group bounced back, reforming with a new touring bassist, Sergio Vega of Quicksand. Over the next decade, Deftones continued to sonically explore, stretching into ambient optimism (“Diamond Eyes” in 2010), hardcore and dream pop (“Koi No Yokan” in 2012) and the almost sensual curveballs of “Gore” (2016) and “Ohms” (2020).
There have been difficult moments. Vega left the band in 2021, and was replaced in 2022 by Fred Sablan, who has played with Marilyn Manson. Carpenter, 55, learned he has Type 2 Diabetes, and no longer flies on planes because of anxiety issues. (For international tours, an old friend from Sacramento fills in.) Sometimes creative differences spill out into the public in interviews.
“If we were going to break up as a band or not be friends or whatever, that would have happened a long time ago,” Moreno said with a laugh.
Carpenter agreed. “It’s OK to not like someone every once in a while, you know?” he said. “Like, I hate you right now. But I actually love you.”
By 2022, the group saw a burst of new interest. Nu metal — a category they have always tried to evade — was experiencing a revival, and Deftones’ work stood out. Young people discovered songs like “Cherry Waves” and “Hole in the Earth” as they went viral on social media. “Change (in the House of Flies),” one of Deftones’ earliest hits, surged to more than a half billion plays on Spotify. Last year, 50,000 tickets to a Deftones and System of a Down co-headlining show in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park sold out in 90 minutes.
“Perhaps it’s like kids are discovering their version of Depeche Mode, the Smiths, the Cure, in terms of lyricism and mood,” said Jeff Sosnow, an A&R executive at Reprise and Warner Records, the band’s label, in an interview. “Sometimes if you stick around long enough like Deftones have, you might just catch another generation.”
Carpenter referenced a band in-joke about its work: “Our records take a decade to actually develop,” he said. “We’ll put it out, and then 10 years later is when it does what you think it would’ve did when it first came out.”
“Private Music” has 11 experimental yet concise tracks, including “Souvenir,” a space-rock anthem that brings a breath of fresh air and positivity: “We gaze at the night, we own it, it’s divine / We ride,” Moreno sings.
The frontman, coming up on three years of sobriety, said he feels more present, more accountable, and more able to focus on his ideas. “Ecdysis,” a term that describes reptiles shedding their skin, is the third track on the album, hinting at a personal transformation for Moreno.
“I went through that thing a lot of artists fear, like whether this or that drug has something to do with my creativity,” Moreno said. “But honestly, the minute that I started being creative without it, I realized I didn’t need it. And now, maybe because of this, I feel like we made one of our best records — it stands right alongside anything that we’ve ever done.”
Mike Isaac is a technology correspondent for The Times based in San Francisco. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley.
