{"id":296411,"date":"2026-02-13T18:12:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T18:12:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/296411\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T18:12:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T18:12:07","slug":"deftones-review-alt-metal-veterans-sound-exceptionally-fresh-38-years-on-deftones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/296411\/","title":{"rendered":"Deftones review \u2013 alt-metal veterans sound exceptionally fresh 38 years on | Deftones"},"content":{"rendered":"

Early 00s metal is enjoying a revival, but that alone can\u2019t account for the dramatic surge in commercial fortunes being enjoyed by Deftones<\/a>. Thirty-one years on from the release of their debut album, they find themselves, as frontman Chino Moreno has put it, \u201cliterally bigger than we\u2019ve ever been\u201d. Between the release of 2020\u2019s Ohms and last year\u2019s Private Music their monthly listener figures on Spotify surged from two million to 17 million. The 15,000-capacity venue where they open their UK tour is accordingly heaving.<\/p>\n

The reason, with a certain inevitability, is TikTok virality. Tonight, Deftones\u2019 setlist is liberally peppered with tracks ubiquitous on the social media app, from opener Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away) to encore Cherry Waves \u2013 although why its users have alighted on them is a matter of conjecture. On fan forums, opinions range from the practical (younger listeners discovered the band after emo rappers sampled their music) to the more earthy: there is discussion of a phenomenon called \u2013 dear God – \u201chornycore\u201d into which the Deftones apparently fit because Moreno has \u201csexual tones\u201d and is \u201ca fox\/daddy\u201d.<\/p>\n

Whatever the reason, you can see its effects in the Birmingham crowd: grizzled battle jacket-clad metalheads and people visibly old enough to remember the release of Deftones\u2019 1997 breakthrough Around the Fur rub shoulders with tweenage goths, any putative parent-scaring qualities about their look \u2013 boys in makeup, girls in tights festooned with pentagrams \u2013 undermined by the fact that they\u2019re actually here with their parents.<\/p>\n

Moreno takes the spotlight. Photograph: Clemente Ruiz<\/p>\n

And as Deftones play in front of a giant screen filled with trippy clips from Jodorowsky\u2019s avant-garde arthouse classic Holy Mountain, it\u2019s hard not to think of their renaissance as a good-will-out just reward. If you can see why they got tagged nu-metal 25 years ago \u2013 brawny pit-inciting riffs over rhythms that bear a pronounced hip-hop influence \u2013 they were, from the start, possessed of both a far wider musical bandwidth and a noticeably different emotional temperature than the genre suggests.<\/p>\n

The preponderance of flanged basslines and effects-laden guitar on Change (In the House of Flies) underline more than a passing familiarity with the 80s oeuvre of Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Cure. Elsewhere, on 2006\u2019s Cherry Waves and last year\u2019s Infinite Source alike, the guitars arrive in blurry waves of distortion. Deftones spent considerably more time in the company of My Bloody Valentine\u2019s Loveless than their peers, which both demonstrates excellent taste and seems weirdly prescient. In 2026, you can\u2019t move for hazy-sounding music from a variety of genres that you can ultimately trace back to My Bloody Valentine\u2019s innovations: in a sense, Deftones were shoegaze revivalists before there actually was a shoegazing revival.<\/p>\n

The effect is incredibly powerful. Rather than temper-tantrum angst, the band\u2019s overall mood is oddly reflective and melancholy: the sound of Moreno\u2019s voice in more recumbent mode \u2013 floating above the melee on Hole in the Earth or Locked Club \u2013 doesn\u2019t feel sexual so much as wistful. Moreover, it\u2019s an effect they\u2019ve managed to maintain for a long time: if there isn\u2019t any noticeable cooling in the audience\u2019s ardour when the band shift from a beloved old song to something off Private Music, that\u2019s probably because there\u2019s no noticeable dip in musical quality.<\/p>\n

Moreover, what they do never feels vintage, like a dispatch from history that brings about a warm glow of nostalgia. There\u2019s nothing beyond their confidence to suggest Deftones are the best part of 40 years away from their formation \u2013 \u201cest 1988\u201d, as the T-shirts on the merch stand put it. If a new band came up with something like this \u2013 and wrote songs this good \u2013 you suspect they\u2019d be doing exceptionally fine business too. Perhaps that\u2019s ultimately what\u2019s at the root of Deftones\u2019 renaissance: their younger fans aren\u2019t buying into a myth of the past, but something that sounds like the present.<\/p>\n

Deftones play OVO Hydro, Glasgow, 13 February; then touring<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Early 00s metal is enjoying a revival, but that alone can\u2019t account for the dramatic surge in commercial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296412,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,278],"class_list":{"0":"post-296411","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296411\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}