Deftones – Around the Fur: The Duality That Transcended Nu-Metal’s Limits

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An Ambitious Work Beyond Genre

On October 28, 1997, Deftones unleashed their second studio album Around the Fur, triggering a seismic shift in the alternative metal scene. While nu-metal’s tidal wave was swallowing American rock whole, Deftones weren’t riding the crest—they were carving out their own current in the depths below.

As Korn and Limp Bizkit dominated MTV with rap rhythms and aggressive grooves, Deftones gambled on a dangerous experiment: fusing shoegaze’s dreamlike textures and new wave’s sensibility with metal’s crushing weight.

What makes this album vital isn’t just commercial success. Around the Fur belonged to nu-metal’s expiration-dated genre, yet somehow erased that expiration date entirely.

There’s a reason Gen Z rediscovers it through TikTok in the 2020s, and why modern metalcore acts like Loathe and Spiritbox still mine it as reference material. This album established a new aesthetic—”the coexistence of heaviness and beauty”—that became a timeless, universal language.

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Recording Context: Musical Awakening in Seattle

After establishing their foundation with a debut album, Deftones emerged from a year and a half of touring fundamentally transformed. The stage experience crystallized beyond mere technical improvement into a clear vision of what they wanted to create. To realize that vision, they chose Studio Litho, run by Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard. The Seattle sessions stretching from spring through summer 1997 were more than just recording dates.

The revealing detail: members lived under one roof for the entire working period. Rather than shuttling between studio and lodging, they chose the intensity of collective creation—eating, sleeping, breathing music together. Chi Cheng’s situation was even more dramatic. He missed the initial rehearsals outside Sacramento—at the time, he was weighing career paths beyond music back in San Diego.

But his decision to return before serious recording began proved pivotal. His bass didn’t simply reinforce Stephen Carpenter’s guitar foundations. Instead, it crossed, collided, and carved out unexpected spaces. That tension became the DNA of the Deftones sound.

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Production & Sound: The Invisible Magician’s Touch

Terry Date had already secured heavyweight status in the metal world through Pantera’s Vulgar Display of Power, but for the Deftones collaboration, he pulled a completely different card. Rather than stamping his signature on the album, he chose to maximize the raw grain of the band’s unpolished gem.

The approach to sculpting each instrument’s texture broke conventional rules. Stephen Carpenter flipped the effects chain, placing chorus before distortion—a reversal that created dimensional depth, as if the air itself were vibrating. Abe Cunningham swapped out snares for each track, painting unique percussive colors, while mic placement ignored textbook wisdom to maximize spatial resonance.

Chino Moreno ditched the live-performance mics from the previous record for studio-grade equipment, capturing the extreme volume spectrum he commanded—from whisper to scream—with surgical precision. Frank Delgado’s turntable work functioned not as typical hip-hop scratching but as sonic architecture for atmosphere. His contributions buffered the space between razor-sharp guitar and gossamer melody.

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Musical Identity: Duality as Weapon

The album title itself carries weight. Around the Fur—surrounding the fur, or beyond the fur. Chino Moreno interpreted it as the contrast between surface glamour and interior death traces.

This extreme opposition of surface brilliance and inner brutality formed the blueprint penetrating not just lyrics but the entire musical architecture. Those unpredictable moments when violent guitar riffs suddenly pivot into consoling melodies—that’s what separated Deftones from the nu-metal pack.

The band’s reference points were equally unconventional. Duran Duran, The Cure, The Smiths, Sade—new wave and post-punk icons from ’80s Britain, names rarely mentioned in nu-metal circles. The blurred guitar walls and receded vocals on tracks like “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” translated My Bloody Valentine’s shoegaze grammar into metal. The crossbreeding was risky, but ultimately granted the band longevity transcending genre shelf life.

Deftones’ positioning within the nu-metal landscape was delicate. Geographically close to Korn—Sacramento and Bakersfield—the band firmly rejected homogenization with their neighbors. When media slapped the “Baby Korn” label on them, Chino Moreno expressed visceral disgust, repeatedly declining joint tour invitations with other nu-metal acts. Korn’s Jonathan Davis reportedly asked, “Why are you distancing yourselves from us?” This wasn’t vanity but strategy to protect artistic independence—a choice that enabled survival after genre trends faded.

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Lyrical Themes: Soundtrack to Postcoital Dysphoria

Lyrics are far more opaque than the previous record, yet that ambiguity creates deeper emotional resonance. One critic read the entire album as musical translation of “postcoital dysphoria”—the emptiness arriving immediately after sex. It sonically shapes the psychological drop from physical climax into void and self-loathing.

“My Own Summer (Shove It)” uses the desire to push away the sun as metaphor for severing from the world. “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” depicts escapist psychology choosing flight over confrontation, loneliness rendered as motion.

“Lhabia” addresses the vicious cycle of substances—the shuttle between addiction and withdrawal. “Mascara” tangles relational obsession with destructive eroticism. “Headup” stands as the exception with explicit clarity, honoring the departed Dana Wells while channeling will to overcome loss. The word “Soulfly” from these lyrics became Max Cavalera’s new band name, establishing a link in metal history.

Overall, lyrics drill into alienation, interior darkness, and self-destructive impulses while maintaining tension against complete surrender. They became a voice for the existential confusion and identity crises that define adolescence and young adulthood.

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Visual Aesthetics: The Accidental Icon

The album cover emerged not from calculated planning but dawn improvisation. Rick Kosick from Big Brother magazine—later famous for Jackass—stopped by the band’s Seattle lodging during a party and around 4 AM captured a woman sitting in the hot tub through a fisheye lens. That woman was local Seattle resident Lisa Hughes, no professional model.

The band later had to track her down for usage consent. The revealing twist: Chino Moreno loathed this cover. His concern was that the party atmosphere might cause misunderstandings about the mostly-married members. Ironically, that very discomfort perfectly visualized the album’s intended message—the crack between surface and interior.

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Commercial & Critical Reception: Success Beyond Expectations

This album lifted Deftones from cult territory onto mainstream radar. First-week sales of 43,000 copies landed them at No. 29 on the Billboard 200, holding that chart position for 17 weeks. Compared to the debut’s Heatseekers peak at No. 23, this was dramatic ascension. Around the Fur claimed the Heatseekers summit and maintained it for 21 weeks. The UK chart showing at No. 56 established their first international foothold.

Certification history proves the album’s endurance. Gold arrived in June 1999, with Platinum following nearly 14 years post-release in June 2011. This demonstrates the work as not merely riding the ’90s nu-metal wave but earning recognition as value that ages well.

MTV and radio’s muscle can’t be dismissed. Heavy rotation of “My Own Summer (Shove It)” and “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” music videos imprinted Deftones’ visual identity on mass consciousness.

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Track Analysis: Five Variations on Duality

My Own Summer (Shove It)

Born from improvisation, yet it showcases Deftones’ most calculated tension architecture. Rejecting sun and summer, this track explicitly declares the album’s core theme of peeling back society’s enforced positivity. Stephen Carpenter’s riff gradually tightens like stolen oxygen, while Chino Moreno’s vocals physically recreate the moment suppressed discomfort detonates into eruption.

Lyrics choosing shade as salvation constitute physiological rejection of capitalist daylight hours packaging productivity and sociability as virtue. The underwater shark cage music video sank the modern psyche’s dilemma beneath the surface—craving isolated safety zones while forced to coexist with danger.

Around the Fur

Borrowing the title, this track violently experiments with the album’s duality theme. The speaker simultaneously declares vanity “empty” while craving “your gaze fixed on me”—the self-loather addicted to others’ stares.

Frank Delgado’s audio effects sonically translate lyrical ambivalence by hiding serrated edges beneath smooth surfaces. The word “love” exploding after calling out “Prostitute” proves loathing and salvation impulses can pulse simultaneously in one heart. This demonstrates Deftones’ clinical refusal to romanticize relationships, compressing their ugly truthfulness instead.

Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)

The definitive moment Deftones escaped the nu-metal ghetto. The purposeless flight of “anywhere, doesn’t matter” declares that escape itself, not the destination, offers salvation. The transition from nu-metal’s aggressive opening into shoegaze’s blurred textures structurally recreates anger’s chemical reaction eventually precipitating as resignation and melancholy.

Chino Moreno’s androgynous vocals innovatively converted vulnerability into strategy within a metal scene weaponizing masculinity. Without this choice, White Pony’s artistic leap would’ve been impossible, and the band’s survival beyond genre trends equally unattainable.

Lotion

The gentle intro is a trap. The sonic violence immediately erupting most aggressively executes the album’s strategy of betraying surface with interior. Nausea toward the commercialized music industry manifests not as mere criticism but physiological rejection response.

Chino Moreno’s vocal cord-shredding screams and Stephen Carpenter’s dissonant guitar forge demonic darkness—the sound of attempting to vomit the entire system. This scream-melody crossover method became the vocal blueprint for countless 2000s post-hardcore bands. Through this track, Deftones expanded nu-metal beyond simple genre into new emotional expression grammar.

Dai the Flu

Inscribing Chi Cheng’s name in the title, this track proves bassists can command a song’s emotional core. The way distorted, blunt bass tone translates dub and reggae’s repetitive groove into metal demonstrates Deftones pulling diverse genres into metal’s gravitational field. Lyrics depicting sacrifice in unbalanced relationships illuminate the album’s exploration of relational pathology from another angle.

Sonic construction through different tuning than other album tracks made this the album’s hidden room. Live performance scarcity—only 83 times—transformed the track into reward granted solely to fans discovering this passage. After Chi Cheng’s 2013 death, this song became memorial evidence that his bass formed the skeletal structure of Deftones’ sound.

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Legacy & Influence: Nu-Gaze’s Birth and Ongoing Impact

This album’s greatest legacy lies in redefining weight and beauty not as adversaries but symbiotic partners. While most nu-metal obsessed over rap and rhythmic impact, Deftones imported shoegaze and post-punk’s dreamscapes into metal territory. This hybrid became the genesis of the flow eventually named “nu-gaze.”

Today’s bands pursuing refined heaviness study this album as textbook. Britain’s Loathe practically functions as Deftones’ direct descendants. Spiritbox’s Courtney LaPlante confessed drawing inspiration from their genre-boundary-crossing attitude. Architects’ Sam Carter praised Deftones as “the only band that grew up in the nu-metal generation yet survived without getting swallowed by that cartoonish trend.” Influence extends beyond metal. The Weeknd openly acknowledged referencing Deftones’ dark, sensual atmosphere.

Into the 2020s, TikTok carries the album to Gen Z rediscovery, cementing its status as cultural symbol. Critics define Around the Fur as “belonging to an expiration-dated genre yet erasing that expiration entirely.” While Limp Bizkit and Korn remain trapped in ’90s nostalgia, Deftones still resonates with both hipsters and Gen Z because of this album’s timeless sonic architecture. Twenty-five years later, Around the Fur stands as proof that metal can evolve beyond simple genre into art form.

More on Deftones

• [Discography Guide] Deftones
• [Music Video Collection] Deftones: History & Playlist
• [Album Review] 2000 Deftones - White Pony: Sacramento's Heretics Rewrote Metal's Future
• [Album Review] 2010 Deftones - Diamond Eyes: Rebirth Through Tragedy and Triumph
• [Music Video Review] Deftones - Back to School (Mini Maggit): When Rebellion Becomes a Product