Deftones: Discography Guide

Deftones cut their debut live to tape with Terry Date, chasing the chaos of their own shows over a polished studio sound. Moreno gripped a handheld mic and screamed his way around the room, and the record still carries that rawness: downtuned riffs, hip-hop cadences, hardcore aggression, not much subtlety. It may be the least essential of the band’s ten records, but tracks like “7 Words” and “Bored” show you exactly where the band’s melodic instincts were headed even this early.

Where Adrenaline was chaos, Around the Fur is control. Terry Date gave the band more space this time, Frank Delgado’s electronics settle into the mix as texture, and Abe Cunningham’s drumming grows noticeably sharper, snapping into place under each riff. “My Own Summer (Shove It)” kicks off with a riff any alternative metal fan would know on sight, “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” takes the loud-quiet-loud playbook and makes every shift in volume feel earned, and “Headup,” with Max Cavalera guesting, hits as hard as the band has ever sounded.

Carpenter’s guitar work stays lower and heavier throughout, giving Moreno room to pull his voice back to a near-whisper before letting it crack open again. Kerrang! handed it a perfect score on release, and that call still holds up; if you only know Deftones by reputation, this is the album that explains it.

The band spent four months on White Pony, longer than on any record before it, and used that stretch to move decisively past the nu-metal framework. Delgado joined as a full member on this record, and Moreno picked up rhythm guitar for the first time, adding a second layer to Carpenter’s parts throughout the album. The songs stretch wide: the grinding weight of “Elite” at one end, the barely-there hush of “Digital Bath” at the other, and “Passenger,” a genuinely cinematic duet with Tool’s Maynard James Keenan, somewhere in between.

Delgado’s turntables and samples stop feeling like an add-on here, weaving through the record as a genuine instrument. Moreno’s vocal takes swing between a near-spoken murmur and a full scream within the same verse, and Carpenter and Cunningham leave more open space around the riffs than on either of the first two records. “Elite” won a Grammy, and the record marks the point where the nu-metal label simply stopped fitting this band. Two and a half decades on, the critical consensus around it has only strengthened as the clearest statement of what makes this band different from everyone else in the genre.

The self-titled record faced an impossible act to follow in White Pony, and the band answered by going heavier and stranger, leaving that album’s polish behind. “Hexagram” opens the album at full force, Carpenter uses a low-tuned seven-string guitar, and the whole thing carries the strain of a recording process defined by isolation and excess. It landed as an underrated record at release, one that took longer than most Deftones albums to find its audience. The atmosphere White Pony built is still here, just pulled into colder, darker territory.

This is the album that almost didn’t get finished. Moreno was struggling with substance issues, and the band was close to splitting the whole time it was being made. “Cherry Waves” and “Beware” remain the most melodic pair on the record, the former building from quiet, plucked notes into a chorus that finally lets go, and it’s also the last record Chi Cheng released with the band before his 2008 accident. It never carved out the same lasting reputation as the records surrounding it, which is exactly why it rewards a second look now.

Diamond Eyes came together in just six months, after Chi Cheng’s accident forced the band to shelve the album they’d been recording with him, and the band chose optimism over grief on purpose. New bassist Sergio Vega locks into Carpenter’s eight-string riffs on “Rocket Skates” and “CMND/CTRL,” and producer Nick Raskulinecz pushes the whole record toward a sharper, more immediate edge, the most direct Deftones has sounded since Around the Fur. Songs come in tighter and faster than anything on the two records before it, verses and choruses landing in quick succession without the long atmospheric builds that defined them.

The title track opens the record on a grinding riff that Carpenter carries through most of the song, and Cunningham’s drumming drives most of the record at a pace closer to the band’s earliest work than to White Pony or the self-titled album. Moreno’s vocals shift between clean singing and screaming throughout, and the record never lingers too long on either one. This is the band circling back to basics without giving up the atmosphere they’d spent a decade building.

Koi No Yokan is where Vega truly stops sounding like a replacement and starts sounding like a full member of the band. Axe-Fx processing plays a bigger role on this record, giving Carpenter and Vega room to stack denser, more layered arrangements than before, and songs like “Rosemary” and “Tempest” swing between the band’s most traditional metal instincts and its most melodic ones without ever feeling like two different records.

Nick Raskulinecz returns behind the board here after producing Diamond Eyes, and the tracklist favors longer, more patient songs over that record’s tighter structures. It’s Vega’s second full-length studio album recorded with the band on bass, years before Fred Sablan eventually took over the role. More than a decade on, it’s still the record longtime fans reach for when they want to hear the whole band locked into the same idea at once.

Gore is one of the most divisive records Deftones have made. Carpenter wasn’t sold on the direction the songs were taking and largely checked out of the sessions, leaving most of the writing to Moreno and Vega. What came out of it is dry and jagged, stretched into oddly wide-open space — a Jerry Cantrell guest spot on “Phantom Bride” doesn’t soften the strangeness. Fans split hard over it on release, and that split has never fully closed; it’s either the album where the atmospheric side of the band finally took over, or the one where it lost the balance that made the earlier records work.

After Gore, the band brought Terry Date back for the first time since the 2003 self-titled album, and every lesson the band had picked up along the way finally clicks into place on Ohms. Carpenter threw himself back into the writing, moving up to a nine-string guitar, and the mix brings back the low-end warmth that Gore had largely gone without. On “Genesis” and “The Spell of Mathematics,” the band’s early aggression collides with the atmospheric control it picked up since White Pony, and critics largely read it as proof the band could still evolve while staying recognizably Deftones.

Private Music is the band’s tenth studio album, arriving thirty years after Adrenaline, with touring bassist Fred Sablan appearing on the record after Vega’s departure and a five-year gap between records — and it still sounds like a band with something to prove. Nick Raskulinecz produces the band again for the first time since Koi No Yokan, the same producer who also worked on Diamond Eyes over a decade earlier.

It moves through the doom-heavy stomp of “My Mind Is a Mountain,” lets “Locked Club” drift into falsetto-led dream pop, and pulls “Infinite Source” from the same well as White Pony, with no wasted transitions. Moreno’s vocals move between a whisper and a full scream across the record, and the shifts never feel forced. Critics responded with something close to universal praise, and the record picked up a Grammy nomination. Rather than reading as a legacy victory lap, it plays like the clearest distillation yet of everything this lineup has built toward.