Deftones’ explosive new album ‘Private Music’ meets the moment head on

Nearly 40 years into Deftones’ career, the Sacramento-bred band are anything but a legacy act. As proved by the visceral allegiance from countless fans half their age thrashing at their feet as they perform on stage, the band continues to be as explosive as they were when they conquered the Warped Tour in the late ‘90s.

The band’s late-era surge in popularity with generations of fans who missed their first (and second) go-round inspires and surprises them.

“It does freak me out when I sit back and, in retrospect, think about it,” Chino Moreno says of Deftones’ longevity. Sitting backstage in a Victoria, Canada, arena during a break from the band’s pre-tour rehearsal, kicking off in Vancouver on Friday, Moreno, 52, is relaxed as he discusses their place in the hard rock landscape.

Since roughly 2022, the singer has noticed that the crowds at some of the band’s meet and greets were younger. In some cases, fans in their teens and early 20s were introducing their parents to the band’s catalog, including their turn-of-the-century classic, “White Pony.”

That stature has only grown as elements of Deftones’ amorphously aggressive sound, which has elements of post-hardcore, trip hop and, most relevant to their revival, shoegaze, have attracted a much younger audience. They’ve broken out from being a cult and critical favorite from the nü-metal scene to being widely appreciated as one of the most important and influential bands of that era.

“I’m not a big social media person,” Moreno says of the medium that’s enabled a new generation to discover Deftones. “There are positive sides to it, like amongst all the noise, you can share music. It is neat that everybody’s much more connected to be able to share it like that.”

Yet, he’s aware that based on the online resurgence, Deftones don’t have to release a new album. Even so, seeing this influx of a younger fan base invigorated the band. It has driven the band to push themselves not just on stage, but in the studio.

“Having this whole new generation of eyes on us and more attention now than we’ve had in decades. So why not embrace it?” he says. “I love that I met a lot of parents and children, fathers and daughters, and they’re at the show together as a bonding experience, and to talk about some type of art you both connected over … it’s really cool.”

The band also knew that if they were going to write and record, it had to be for the right reasons.

Recording “can’t be where the label needs [the album], or we need money,” Moreno explains. “We’ve made records under those circumstances before, and it sucks the fun out of the experience. We’re bratty in that way where we only want to do something if it’s something we want to do. The minute someone tells us we have to do it, then we fight it.”

With the band’s members now scattered across the U.S., Deftones couldn’t wait to get back into the studio together, just like they did as teens when they had a space that felt more like a clubhouse. As Moreno puts it, it excited them to be able to “experiment and hang out together. Locking ourselves in a room for six hours a day, five days a week, was fun. It was like going back into the clubhouse again.”

With “Private Music,” Deftones once again joined forces with Nick Raskulinecz, who produced “Diamond Eyes” and 2012’s “Koi No Yokan” (“Dude, we have to finish the trifecta!” Moreno says he told Raskulinecz whenever they’d see each other.) Throughout the last year and a half, the band and Raskulinecz worked together through a variety of sessions before deciding on the 11 songs that constitute the album. Without a definitive timetable to release their 10th studio album, it allowed for a much more relaxed and enjoyable atmosphere than before. That said, the time between 2020’s “Ohms” and “Private Music” was the longest span between Deftones albums.

“We’re in a mind frame where it’s like we don’t have to make a record,” he says. “It gave us a kick in the butt. If people are talking about us holding us to a certain standard and pushing ourselves. So the fact that we’re gonna do it, we might as well make it great.”

A band this far into its career is generally in their victory-lap era. Write, record, release an album, go on tour, play mostly the hits, sprinkle in a new song, repeat. Not Deftones. Throughout this album, which is another significant achievement, the band mixes the moody and melodic to create a genre-bending album full of fire and fury. Look no further than the equally bombastic “My Mind Is a Mountain” and “Locked Club,” the menacing “Ecdysis,” the soaring Moreno-powered “I Think About You All the Time,” and the push-and-pull of the methodical “cxz.” Throughout the sessions, which included three additional songs left in various states, Deftones wrote and recorded batches of songs in different locations, which Moreno says allowed for a respective track to have its own sonic personality as a product of its environment.

“‘I Think About You All the Time’ was written in Malibu at 8 in the morning and was pretty fast,” he says. “We put it aside then, after dinner that night, we made some coffee and went out and finished it. Whereas with ‘Ecdysis,’ it was the last song we wrote, and it was while we were in the studio. We were looking at our collection of songs that we already had and just going, like, ‘OK, where does it fit within this batch of songs?’ We wanted something jagged and also a little weird that was more experimental but with an aggressive approach.”

As their tours have gotten bigger, external factors have given the band a new appreciation for their ongoing success. During the band’s 2024 Coachella appearance, guitarist Stephen Carpenter felt his performance wasn’t up to his standard, telling Zane Lowe of Apple Radio that he was “completely out of it for both shows. I barely had enough energy to stand up. All I could think about during those shows was, ‘Please, just don’t fall over on stage.’” Later, he’d find out that he has Type II diabetes.

A few years before Carpenter learned of his health issues, Moreno got sober. Those changes enabled the bandmates, friends since they were teens, to become even closer, despite any misconceived notion that they’ve been at odds. Though Carpenter doesn’t travel internationally with Deftones due to his condition, when the band was on the road in the States earlier this year, he and Moreno were busmates. They pushed each other to remain on their respective lifestyle-changing tracks.

“I think we’re both very proud of each other,” Moreno says of their changes. “He is so on it. He’s an obsessive person about a lot of things, and now he’s obsessed about his blood sugar and about his health. It’s parallel to my sobriety. So we get on the bus after a show, and we’re all into our diet. With my sobriety, I think he sees me being a better version of myself.”

Deftones perform at Kia Forum.

(Clementine Ruiz)

“Private Music” stands not just as a wonderfully cohesive riff-heavy body of work with a relentless energy that is the next shapeshifting step in the Deftones catalog, but is also a well-balanced album. It’s a logical sonic step for the Deftones universe. The band has also been building its annual Dia de Los Deftones festival. The lineup for the sixth edition, taking place in November in San Diego, includes Virginia Beach, Va., hip-hop heroes Clipse, beloved metal band Deafheaven, Rico Nasty, 2hollis and more. Comparing curating the festival to compiling a mixtape, Deftones is the common thread that ties these diverse artists together, which Moreno calls “a fun experiment.”

Decades later, it’s Deftones’ music and adventurous sonic spirit that keep the crowds coming back, anticipating the group’s next move. It’s allowed them to gradually build on successes without being weighed down by the past. Now, it’s moved so quickly and exponentially that they’ve barely had time to catch their collective breath — with another stretch of arena dates and a pair of co-headlining stadium shows with System of a Down on the docket.

“I’m excited to be busy,” Moreno says. “I’m the type of person who has been lucky enough to have done this for pretty much all of my adult life. We didn’t get to go out and tour ‘Ohms’ after it was released, and this is such a different time. I really love this batch of songs, so I’m eager to go play them and stay busy for the next couple of years.”