DEFTONES - Private Music

Ever since Chino Moreno and his accomplices immersed themselves, back in 2000, in what (in honor of one of the most iconic tracks from the masterpiece "White Pony") we might call a “digital bath,” everything has changed for them. They would never again be just a nu metal band, having by then already distanced themselves, in terms of critical esteem, from that (at the time) much-maligned scene. And their sound would go on to live through a perpetual evolutionary urgency.

Twenty-five years and six albums later, Deftones are still like this, incapable of aging, curious, faithful to their origins, yet determined to channel their old fury into new solutions. The torrential opening of "My Mind Is A Mountain" promises tons of granite, groove and guitar sledgehammers, but the digital backdrops sketched behind Chino's voice in the more relaxed moments steer the album toward a cyber-punk landscape painting - the one at the close of "Souvenir" being the most entrancing.

The form of the Sacramento singer (now fifty-two) is enviable: he leaps from rapping to falsetto amid the low-tuned bombs of "Locked Club", and stretches out like elastic on "Ecdysis". On the violent "Cut Hands" he even indulges in the whim of growling like he did back in the "Adrenaline" days.

So there's still plenty here to mosh and lose yourself to, but "Private Music" is above all a sorrowful record, loaded with reflections and contradictions that flow from the difficult navigation of contradictory, deceptive times. Take "Infinite Source," a track with the stature of an (instant) alternative rock classic, built on the lashing contrast between the spry guitar work of the verses and the inextinguishable melancholy of the chorus; or the romanticism of "I Think About You All The Time," a love ballad stitched together from dream-pop stillness, alternative metal surges, and seafaring metaphors.

"Private Music" is the record of a band that (unlike many of their peers in the scene) isn't afraid to change, or even to age. A band that never barricades itself inside its own comfort zone, and isn't scared of the reactions of its more reactionary fans — whom, perhaps, it would rather just lose. And it's precisely for this reason that, almost forty years after its founding, it's still out there, among the great, the imperishable ones. And here we are, lining up to buy this record with the white snake on its fluorescent green cover, admittedly a bit kitsch. Just like twenty-five or twenty-eight years ago — in case you started out with their first true masterpiece, "Around The Fur".

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29/08/2025