Deftones: private music
I’ve never really understood why I like Deftones. When I first discovered their sound nearly 20 years ago, it didn’t resemble anything else in the then-rising wave of so-called nu- or neo-metal. And yet, the people who listened to them were often fans of Korn, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, sometimes Soulfly, maybe even Tool, and frequently some punk bands of that era like The Offspring or Green Day. It was the standard spectrum of heavy and mid-heavy music of those years. But despite the eclectic company we used to lump them in with during our teenage years, Deftones always sounded incredibly unique and undefined.
Today, these eccentrics are releasing their tenth studio album, ‘private music’ (stylized in lowercase, as are all of its track titles), and with a certain sense of relief I can say that this record is just as unique and distinctive as everything else they’ve ever released — everything that, I believe, we fans genuinely treasure in their work.
Writing about a specific Deftones album is no easy task. Beyond the usual banalities (11 tracks, 2 singles, produced by Nick Raskulinecz, the usual lineup — Stephen Carpenter, Abe Cunningham, Frank Delgado and Chino Moreno, plus touring bassist Fred Sablan), the album is another entry in the band’s unmistakable style — maybe with a touch more darkness, though that element has never exactly been absent from their music.
To understand what that really means, we can try a little listener’s thought experiment: take the entire Deftones discography, put it on shuffle and try to guess the year of release based purely on the sound of each track. I’d bet that unless you have specific memories tied to a particular song, it’s impossible to place it in time by sound alone.
The same applies fully to ‘private music’. It doesn’t belong to 2025, just as no Deftones track belongs to any particular year. They don’t even belong to any particular place. Deftones’ music has always existed outside of time and space. It isn’t dated, it isn’t current, it isn’t futuristic. It simply is. Born in some liminal space between consciousness and dream, Deftones have, over the years, managed to invert the phenomenon of dreaming music — instead, they create music in reality that belongs to a dream. It’s almost like they’ve reverse-engineered music from a dream you only half remember — you recognize the shapes, but the colors and physics are just wrong enough to make it magical.
Their guitars often sound more like vast synth pads than traditional riffs, thanks to heavy reverb, delay, and layering. It blurs the line between rock band and ambient soundtrack. They’ll mix crushing heaviness with ethereal beauty in the same moment, as if two different worlds are colliding. The songs rarely have a clear “destination,” but instead float or drift, giving you that strange weightlessness. Chino’s lyrics don’t often tell stories — they’re more like surreal images or fragments of memories. That makes the music feel detached from reality, like a transmission from somewhere else.
You can experience all of this in full force on ‘private music’ — a truly complete Deftones experience, this time infused with an atmosphere of rebirth and eternity, a dark transition into something new, in the shadow of a pre-apocalyptic, purifying pain. Listen to the album all the way through — try to interpret the dream for yourself. Search for hidden messages, discover them, or simply create your own — there’s plenty of material to spark reflection in tracks like ‘my mind is a mountain’, ‘ecdysis’, ‘cXz’, ‘milk of the madonna’, ‘departing the body’. It’s worth it.