It's September, 1999. I am sitting in the driver's seat of my 1983 Toyota Corona station wagon, window down, music blasting as loud as the car's tired old speakers can manage while I cruise home after a day of classes. I'd say I was singing along, but that's not quite right; I was trying to shriek, because in my tape deck was a busted old copy of Around the Fur.
1999 was, if you can either project the life experience or just do the math, a really long time ago. Some of the other tapes I had rattling around in my glovebox at the time included albums by Incubus, Kyuss, Aesop Rock, Helmet, DJ Shadow, DJ Krush and, uh, Sevendust. Each tape was a different sound for a different mood, but all had one thing in common: they were all very much a product of their time, and it was that time.
If you'd asked me to imagine what my life would be like 25 years into the future, and more specifically what I'd be listening to, I'd probably have guessed it would be none of those artists. Surely I'd have moved onto some new shit by then. I'd also have guessed we might have built a moonbase and worked out some way to wriggle out of capitalism's more destructive tendencies by now, so that's a womp there, but on the former I'd have been mostly right! Most of those artists, if they're still performing and making records at all, are doing so frozen in time. If I listen to them (DJ Krush's new album is great!), it's usually as a form of nostalgic comfort food.
There's nothing wrong with that! Most artists are products of their time; that's how art works. I won't talk shit about anything Incubus have done in the last 20 years, because a) they got rich playing the hits, so good for them, and b) I remember Incubus as a band defining my late teens, not my mid-40s. There are other artists doing that work now.
As my musical tastes have evolved over the decades, though, and as new bands and artists emerge to replace the ones I liked who have dropped off, I keep seeing a few familiar names from my 1999 tape collection popping up amidst the turnover. And not in that nostalgic comfort food kind of way–in ways that show them to be artists interested in the long haul, in reinventing themselves for new times and new challenges, unafraid to let fresh sounds and experiences influence their ever-changing output.
Aesop Rock, who I both mentioned above and have written about here previously, is one such person. But another are one of the unlikeliest to have remained relevant past the 1990s, let alone well into the 2020s: Deftones.
These guys? These screaming kids with baggy jeans and skateboards and backpacks, whose crunchy chugs and lyrics about suburban angst marked them as one of the standouts of the nu metal scene of the 1990s, a genre as seemingly consigned to its time as disco? Mentioned so often alongside Limp Bizkit and Korn, they had no business making it out of the millennium as anything other than relics, symbols of nostalgic teen fury and the stars of grainy Woodstock 99 videos.
And yet! Here we are, still talking about and writing about Deftones in 2024. Because while the band's first two albums (1995's Adrenaline and 1997's Around The Fur respectively) are comfortable in their nu metal skin, in 2000 Deftones dropped White Pony, an album full of synth and new wave and countless other influences that made people sit up and think "oh wow, OK".
"White Pony may have transcended the dubious genre by fashioning a truly new form from post-hardcore, industrial, trip-hop, shoegaze, ambient electronics, and synth-pop", reads Pitchfork's review of the now-seminal classic. "Nu metal was smothered by the stench of its own machismo and stale beer, and Deftones recognized that separating nu-metal from rap wasn’t as important as allowing it to be a platform for romantics and dreamers—its rallying cries were 'I feel like more!' and 'I could float here forever!' bravely and enthusiastically embracing the possibility of transcending the mundanity that pervaded their lives in Sacramento and cities just like it".
"White Pony was the change Deftones wanted to see in themselves and they watched you change right along with them."
That separation from their peers didn't take place by chance, or simply through the passing of years and slightly different experiences. Deftones could see the future, and what it would take to remain a part of it.
“I wanted to go left [of nu metal], not because I felt we were better than these bands,” lead singer Che Moreno told The Ringer in 2020. “I wanted our band to stand on our own two feet. Nu metal was at its peak. It’s in the name—nu metal—it’s going to be old in time. Eventually, it did die. My whole idea was when that ship does go down, I don’t want to be on that motherfucker. 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.”
You can even see this play out in real-time by listening to the slightly jarring version of White Pony currently available on platforms like Spotify. The original version of the album, released on CD in 2000, consisted of 11 tracks, opening with “Feiticeira”, which absolutely plays like it's supposed to be the opening track of the album. After a disappointing commercial launch, however, especially compared with blockbuster sales for peers like Linkin Park, Deftones' label at the time (Maverick) despaired at the lack of what they felt were marketable singles.
So the band turned in a heavier, four-minute rework of White Pony's final track, the 7:32 “Pink Maggit”, renaming it “Back to School” and lacing it with so much rap it feels like a nu metal parody. Maverick promptly shot a teen movie-esque video for it in a high school (Moreno was 27 at the time), released it as a single and then reissued the album with “Back to School” as the new, shoehorned opening track.
The result was...yeah.
"’Back to School’ was a mistake", Moreno later reflected. "A calculated song, that had been built up with only one aim in mind: It should be a single…’Back to School’ was released because I was an idiot. I wanted to prove something [to Maverick]...they said we lost our heaviness, and there were no more singles on the album. First, I wanted to stick this idea up my ass, but then I thought: 'I'm gonna show those fuckers how easy it is to create a hit-single.' And so I rapped a hip hop part on that song, we shortened it and half an hour later, the hit single was ready to roll."
"Time has been about as kind to ‘Back to School’ as it has been for Fieldy’s haircuts or Wes Borland’s eye contacts", Pitchfork have since written, "but the rationale behind its creation makes it an unintentionally perfect appendix to White Pony". Which it is, but to a whole stage of the band's career as well. "Back to School"--everything it was, everything it wasn't and everything that went into its release--was the point where Deftones made a final, rap-heavy nod to the band's back catalogue (and nu metal itself) before leaving it behind. A shedding of old, dead skin.
The rest of White Pony is a forwards-facing masterpiece, an eclectic mix of the band's heavier legacy, but also it's far-flung inspirations and signposts for the journey they'd be taking over the decades to come. "Twenty years after its release, White Pony is still the Deftones album", writes Matthew Sigur in an excellent oral history of the release. "Musically, you can hear the band’s collage of influences, the very reason then-A&R rep Guy Oseary signed the band to Maverick Records. There’s drummer Abe Cunningham’s love of the Police drummer Stewart Copeland on ‘Digital Bath’. Bassist Chi Cheng’s off-kilter rhythm rolls throughout ‘Korea’. Guitarist Stephen Carpenter shreds with the best of them on ‘Elite’. Turntablist Frank Delgado brings a cinematic atmosphere to songs like ‘Teenager.’”
’Back to School’ was released because I was an idiot.
Despite those initial sales disappointments, the album was heralded as a critical breakthrough at the time; not only did it score countless accolades from outlets like Kerrang, but the song “Elite” even won a wholly unexpected Grammy in 2001. "All the people were on the ground, on the floor, and we were up sort of in the balcony, we were like, 'We're not gonna win. Look where we're sitting'", remembers drummer Abe Cunningham. "Everybody else who was winning, they'd get up there quick and get back. So we were just watching it and the whole thing was rad, just seeing the (stuff) go down. And all of a sudden they called our name. We just jumped over this balcony down onto the floor and ran up there. It was pretty cool, man".
Yet the album's legacy in the decades to follow, and the direction (or absence of a clear one) it mapped out for the band, has perhaps been even more important. It's impossible to read a "Greatest metal albums" list without encountering at least one Deftones album, but the catch with Deftones is that they've remained relevant for so long and put out so many records with different sounds you'll never know which album it's going to be. White Pony frequently features, sure, but so too does second album Around The Fur (1997), which matured their nu metal sound and provided glimpses of a more nuanced future, and even 2012's Koi No Yokan, which was so good it prompted its own endless slate of "Deftones are forever" editorials, even though it was recorded in the midst of some pretty tragic circumstances for the band.
I don't want this piece to sound like I'm shitting on Korn or Linkin Park or anyone else you may have been into at the time and might still be into now (or are even getting into for the first time if you're younger!). Music is a gift no matter when it's released, and as corny as I think those bands are today, there's no disputing their relevance and importance to me, you or anyone else at the time they blew up.
I just want to emphasise that if becoming a rock star is hard, then staying one over the decades, as tastes and styles and genres come and go, is infinitely harder. It takes work, sure, but also the self-awareness to know that time marches on with or without you, and that if you want to keep making music that pushes boundaries for as long as you can, you need to make sure your horizons are being challenged and broadened at all times.
In the 12 years since Koi No Yokan--which was released 12 years after White Pony--Deftones have just kept at it, releasing two more albums (2016's Gore and 2020's Ohm) that both, once again, had an instantly-identifiable Deftones sound while also managing to venture off into unexplored territory. "Gore is easily Deftones’ most engaging record since White Pony", Pitchfork wrote in 2016, "filled with carefully crafted hooks disguised as bridges and transition. As with all of their best music, it sounds like the brutal, beautiful result of the band being passionate enough to rip each other’s heads off."
"A good measure of Deftones’ importance beyond the world of metal...is that some of the biggest bands in the world consider them the blueprint of how a band should evolve", NME wrote in 2012, while in 2016 Jonathan Dick said on NPR, "The Sacramento-based group has gradually distanced itself not only from the genre it helped establish but from virtually any kind of identifiable genre parameter".
With each album and each passing decade, Deftones have defied categorization; OK you could label them in the 90's, but since then (White Pony especially) they've been...whatever they felt like being at the time. "I've never felt comfortable with fitting in any one box, even from when I was young", Moreno remembers in a 2020 interview around the time of the release of Ohms:
In high school I hung out with everybody. I hung out with the goth kids. I was a skater, but I hung out with the preppy kids who listened to Pink Floyd and just everything. Some of the rap kids, everything. I listened to everything growing up and I never felt comfortable just having to pick a music that I was going to make, or at least that I was going to like even at that time. But especially when we're making music, we all continue on with that thought. I mean, yes, I think we are a rock band, you know what I mean? And the majority of it does have these heavy undertones, but to just box ourselves into that, I have never felt comfortable. So I feel like we've always drawn from influences from all the stuff that we grew up liking and loving.
As long as it’s been–the band first formed in 1988–that process looks set to continue for a few more years, at least: Deftones' are currently working on their tenth studio album,
Back to School is a week of stories about changes, nostalgia, and learning new things. It's part of our big goals for 2024; if you like what you see and want to help us get there, please consider subscribing.
