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They’d arrived in one of those creative sweet spots where every new idea filters back into a unified whole. Deftones were guiding their fearless ambition with a rare synchronicity - hard-won, judging from the accounts of Moreno and Carpenter butting heads in the studio. A dream-pop knife party that played like a spectral sequel to Around The Fur‘s surprise hit “Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away),” a teenage heartache lullaby guided by newly added turnablist Frank Delgado’s cuts and textures, a climactic night drive with Maynard James Keenan riding shotgun: It all hangs together magnificently. From there White Pony makes its way across staggering territory, redrawing the boundaries of what Deftones can be. His screed could easily be directed at a self-styled Instagram sad girl of today: “You’re into depression! ‘Cause it matches your eyes!”Īnd those are just the first three songs.
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“Elite” plows ahead angrily like an all-consuming war machine, Moreno shrieking about bleeding out of control in the wake of a filthy Stephen Carpenter guitar vamp. “Tonight, I feel like more!” he shouts, sounding like a beam of light. On “Digital Bath,” he breathes haunted whispers over Abe Cunningham’s loosely swinging backbeat, then explodes upward to infinity when the power chords come charging in. Harmonically rich and breathlessly dynamic, it moves with a stilted grace to match his capricious sing-speak outbursts. Opening track “Feiticeira” bursts forth with guitar octaves in an urgent panic, intensifying into harsh beauty as Moreno kicks out a hallucinatory kidnapping narrative. That path led them to many thrilling destinations. We tried to distance ourselves as much as we could, and the best way to do that was by following the path we were on.” My whole idea was when that ship does go down, I don’t want to be on that motherfucker. It’s in the name - nu-metal - it’s going to be old in time. “I wanted our band to stand on our own two feet,” he explained. It was the sound of a band following their muse away from a disreputable trend and into the great unknown.Īs Moreno told The Ringer in a new oral history of the album, breaking away from the nu-metal pack was both natural and intentional. With White Pony, released 20 years ago this Saturday, they ceased to make sense within the existing containers, even as they caused lightbulbs to go off for legions of listeners who’d stick with them long after the nu-metal hype faded away. While their alleged peers were presenting a caricature of adolescent rage, Deftones were telling alluring stories of sex, drugs, and violence, visceral and blurry adult content in an age of arrested development.
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Rhythmically, melodically, lyrically, they were creating their own language, or at least twisting existing dialects into disorienting new shapes. The style they were cultivating didn’t just stand alone within their genre it marked Deftones as an island unto themselves in the popular music landscape. They were Depeche Mode gone beast mode, Meshuggah run through a Sade filter, Faith No More as directed by David Fincher. But by slathering this barrage with goth brooding, new wave glamour, and shoegaze haze, they’d zeroed in on a more artful breed of sleazy aggression. Scene signifiers like detuned riffs, DJ scratches, and vigorous bass popping still abounded, and Chino Moreno launched into throat-shredding tirades or syncopated scat tantrums at least as often as he whimpered and wailed. With their second album, 1997’s Around The Fur, the punishingly heavy Sacramento band had established themselves as a unique presence under the nu-metal umbrella, blowing out the skate-park rap-rock of their 1995 debut Adrenaline into dreamy, mascara-smudged grandeur.