Album Reviews

On their first new album in five years - and their tenth overall - Deftones dazzle, dream, and sting. Produced once again by Nick Raskulinecz, who also helmed two of their most memorable releases (2010’s Diamond Eyes and 2012’s Koi No Yokan), private music finds the Sacramento band sounding inspired, three decades into their career.

Deftones have always existed in a space all their own. Their sound is instantly recognizable, yet that signature style can also limit how far they can push things. Sometimes that leads to more stagnant releases like 2016’s Gore. But private music threads the needle beautifully: it stays true to what set the band apart in the first place, while still sounding fresh. Heavy riffs crash into atmospheric textures, with Chino Moreno’s vocals gliding from dreamy to possessed in the blink of an eye. If anything has shifted, it’s that there’s more dreamlike space and soothing passages than the band has ever committed to record.

Highlights abound. I haven’t really thought of Deftones as catchy, but they come pretty damn close on ‘infinite source’. ‘souvenir’ is downright epic and packs a retro-leaning synth outro that shows how electronic textures can elevate songs rather than bloat them (yeah Turnstile, I’m looking at you!). Elsewhere, ‘i think about you all the time’ sounds as sunny as I’ve ever heard the band before, ‘ecdysis’ packs the album’s most memorable chorus, and ‘cut hands’ is every bit as nasty and jagged as its title suggests. The previously released singles, ‘my mind is a mountain and ‘milk of the madonna,’ deliver some of the best riffs on the album, proving that Deftones haven’t abandoned their bite.

The closing track, the six-minute ‘departing the body,’ is an epic that begins like the score to a sci-fi film before morphing into a brooding finale, with Moreno sounding both wistful and gloomy. It’s a fitting conclusion to a record that constantly shifts between weight and weightlessness.

With private music, Deftones reaffirm their status as masters of contrast: heaviness and atmosphere, beauty and menace, dream and nightmare. ‘~metal dream’ is not just a song on the album, it’s also a pretty apt description of what they’ve built here. Three decades in, they’re still pushing forward, and it’s an absolute pleasure to hear.

private music track listing:

1. my mind is a mountain
2. locked club
3. ecdysis
4. infinite source
5. souvenir
6. cXz
7. i think about you all the time
8. milk of the madonna
9. cut hands
10. ~metal dream
11. departing the body