Deftones

history

Formed in Sacramento, California, in 1988, Deftones assembled one of the most distinctive bodies of work in heavy music, refusing to follow a scene or be contained by one. They kept pulling in opposite directions without ever settling into one. That tension became the music itself.

The original lineup, vocalist Chino Moreno, guitarist Stephen Carpenter, drummer Abe Cunningham, and bassist Dominic Garcia, came together in Sacramento’s underground rock circuit. In 1990, Cunningham departed to play with Phallucy; Garcia shifted to drums to fill the gap, and Chi Cheng stepped in as bassist.

John Taylor then replaced Garcia on drums in 1991, holding the position until Cunningham’s return in 1993. That settled lineup, Moreno, Carpenter, Cunningham, and Cheng, with keyboardist and turntablist Frank Delgado (a featured guest on the first two albums before becoming a full member for White Pony), would go on to define the band’s classic era.

Sacramento to Maverick: The Early Years

Deftones spent years grinding through the Sacramento scene before Maverick Records signed them in 1994. Their debut, Adrenaline, arrived in 1995 — raw, blunt, and unmistakably heavy. It didn’t set the world on fire commercially, but it announced a band with a different center of gravity than most of what was happening around them. The riffs hit hard, but Moreno’s voice already reached for something else: melody, space, restraint. Even at the beginning, the songs didn’t want to stay in one place.

Two years later, Around the Fur (1997) pushed further. The production was direct and immediate, with no softening and no studio gloss, and the material was sharper. Tracks like “My Own Summer (Shove It)” and “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” showed a band getting better at holding contradictions inside a single song: brutal in one moment, quietly devastating in the next. The RIAA certified Around the Fur gold on June 24, 1999, and platinum on June 7, 2011. The singles earned their own certifications — “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” and “My Own Summer (Shove It)” both reached 2x platinum.

The Friction Behind Everything

Before White Pony, the band was pulled between two instincts that shouldn’t have worked together. Carpenter gravitated toward crushing, mechanical heaviness; his reference points were Fear Factory and Meshuggah, bands that treated rhythm as a blunt instrument. Moreno listened to Depeche Mode, The Cure, and The Smiths, bands that drew atmosphere and ache out of synthesizers and restraint. These were not compatible instincts, yet neither side gave ground. They let both pull at full force, and what came out the other side was something neither man could have made alone.

Delgado’s formal induction as a full member added another layer. Rather than lean on traditional scratching or beat juggling, Delgado wove ambient textures through the arrangements, adding depth without weight, atmosphere without distraction.

White Pony and a New Sonic Language

White Pony arrived in 2000 and changed the terms of the conversation entirely. The album absorbed post-hardcore, trip-hop, shoegaze, progressive rock, and post-rock influences, fusing them into a single, coherent whole rather than a collage. Every element had a function: the reverb created depth, the sparse percussion generated tension, the synths opened space that the guitars could then collapse into. The record didn’t feel provisional or experimental. It felt deliberate.

White Pony answered a question few heavy records had convincingly answered before: whether a metal band could be brutal and beautiful in the same breath. Deftones didn’t soften the heaviness to make room for the melody. Both stayed intact, side by side. “Digital Bath” moved like a dream dissolving. “Elite” hit like a wall. The album held both without apology, and that refusal to choose became its defining statement. “Elite” later earned the band the 2001 Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance.

Outside the Nu Metal Moment

By the early 2000s, Nu Metal was everywhere — Limp Bizkit, Korn, Disturbed, Linkin Park dominated the charts and the airwaves. Deftones were commercially adjacent to that wave, but aesthetically, they were somewhere else entirely, refusing to lean fully into any one scene. Their lyrics reached for metaphor rather than complaint, and their heaviness came with intent behind it. When Nu Metal collapsed commercially in the mid-2000s, Deftones kept going. The label had never fully fit them to begin with.

Loss, Grief, and Diamond Eyes

The years between Saturday Night Wrist (2006) and Diamond Eyes (2010) were defined by something no career timeline can properly contain. In 2008, Chi Cheng was involved in a catastrophic car accident that left him in a coma, from which he slowly emerged into a semi-conscious state. The band continued, slowly, and in the face of genuine uncertainty about what continuing even meant.

Sergio Vega, formerly of post-hardcore band Quicksand, was no stranger to the band — he had filled in as touring bassist in 1999 during Chi Cheng’s toe surgery. When Cheng’s accident in 2008 sidelined him indefinitely, Vega stepped back in, returning as the band’s bassist in 2009. Where Cheng’s playing had been dub-influenced, warm, and understated, Vega played with a pick — more precise, leaner, edgier. That shift, paired with a leaner production approach, gave Diamond Eyes a hard clarity that felt earned rather than produced.

Diamond Eyes was followed in 2012 by Koi No Yokan, which scored an 86 on Metacritic and took Album of the Year at the 2013 Revolver Golden Gods Awards. Both records demonstrated a band that had processed grief not by avoiding it but by letting it sharpen the work. Chi Cheng passed away in 2013.

The Digital Shift and Later Albums

Carpenter moved from his Marshall JMP-1 MIDI preamp and power amp setup to a Fractal Axe-Fx digital modeler around the time of Gore‘s release. The 2016 album leaned into clean, atmospheric textures, psychedelic in places, divisive in others. The result was a record some longtime listeners found colder than its predecessors.

Ohms (2020) pulled the threads together. Described by critics as a synthesis of the band’s prior phases, the album balanced control and heaviness with an authority that only comes from decades of refinement. The title track received a 2022 Grammy nomination for Best Rock Performance, and “Genesis” picked up a nomination for Best Metal Performance — neither took home the award, losing to Foo Fighters and Dream Theater respectively. That same year, Mike Shinoda won the Grammy Award for Best Remixed Recording for his reimagining of Deftones’ “Passenger,” drawn from the band’s 2020 remix album Black Stallion.

Private Music and the Tenth Album

In 2021, Vega departed the band. Fred Sablan joined as touring bassist the following year and contributed to the writing and recording of the tenth studio album, and Lance Jackman also came aboard as a touring guitarist, later stepping in for Carpenter on international shows. For Private Music, Carpenter brought tube amplifiers back into a rig that still ran on digital modelers — drawn back, by his own account, to the feel and physical response he felt he’d lost. The band also reunited with producer Nick Raskulinecz, who had helmed Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan, marking their third collaboration. Private Music was released on August 22, 2025 — the band’s tenth studio album, and, like the nine records before it, one that refused to repeat the last.

The Template That Outlasted the Era

The Deftones influence visible in Spiritbox, Loathe, and Sleep Token is not a matter of style. It is structural. Sleep Token’s use of quiet restraint erupting into crushing heaviness, and clean vocals giving way to something far more visceral, has been widely identified by critics as bearing the hallmarks of an approach closely associated with Deftones since White Pony and the albums that followed. The integration of clean and aggressive vocals, the use of dynamic contrast as a compositional device, the willingness to let a song breathe before it destroys you: these are not aesthetic choices being borrowed. They are moves being made from the same playbook.

Spiritbox frontwoman Courtney LaPlante has pointed to White Pony as one of the albums that changed her life, citing Moreno’s falsetto as something she found deeply affecting — a voice that floats over the band’s underlying heaviness rather than fighting it. Critics have frequently drawn the same line from White Pony to Loathe’s blend of ambient atmosphere and downtuned aggression.

What Deftones built works less like a genre and more like a shared approach for holding opposites together without flinching. The bands carrying that approach forward didn’t copy the sound — they picked up the same habit.