Deftones’ Private Music: A Full Album Breakdown

Private Music represents a striking moment in Deftones’ long career. It feels like the most excitement surrounding a new release from them since White Pony at the turn of the millennium. Against the odds, I hear young fans in record shops buzzing about the band again—praising them for writing the most intense love songs, comparing them to a catchier, less experimental Deafheaven, calling it the heaviest post-rock record of the year, or even treating the band like a fresh discovery they can’t believe they’d overlooked. For Deftones themselves, though, this attention is nothing unusual. Unlike many peers from their era, they aren’t coasting on nostalgia or clinging to relevance. They’ve always known exactly who they were, what kind of music they made—and they’ve been right all along.

Today, the Sacramento five-piece may be more relevant than ever. Part of this comes from their roots: aside from a few ill-fated hip-hop experiments, Deftones were essentially creating doomgaze before anyone had a name for it—metal infused with the moody romanticism of The Cure or David Sylvian. The other part lies in consistency. They’ve never truly fallen off, never made an outright bad album. Now the wider music world seems to have caught up with what Deftones have been crafting for decades. Their commercial success has always been there, but it’s the aesthetic legacy that endures. Stephen Carpenter’s seven-string riffs—ferocious yet strangely romantic—set a benchmark for guitarists. Abe Cunningham’s subtle, jazzy touch on drums has remained elusive for imitators. And of course, Chino Moreno’s voice—slipping between ethereal croons and tortured screams—still feels like it’s collapsing under the weight of the world, embodying a kind of teenage desperation and beauty.

Even for new listeners, the hypnotic fade-out of “Souvenir,” the hook-laden chorus of “Milk of Madonna,” and the tense quiet-loud drama of closer “Departing the Body” showcase everything that makes Deftones special: hardened California metalheads straining to create something fragile and beautiful at the edge of chaos.

Is Private Music their best album? No—they’ve released stronger efforts before (Saturday Night Wrist even surpasses White Pony in places). But they’ve never sounded this effortless, this refined. In many ways, they’ve never sounded better.

It’s easy to acknowledge their influence—modern doomgaze outfits like Deafheaven and Nadja trace back to them, and even bands like Chat Pile carry echoes of Moreno and Carpenter’s push-pull tension. More impressive is how Deftones have outlived the nu-metal scene they were once lumped into, emerging as its sole true survivor with credibility intact.

Four decades into their career, the fact they can still come together to create something like Private Music—cinematic, volatile, tender, and ferocious all at once—is a triumph. It’s an album that thrives in contradiction, and in that sense, it’s pure Deftones.