This is the cover story of the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. You can subscribe to get 4 print issues of the mag each year here.Rock bottom is when you stop digging—that’s something you hear in rehabs and 12-step meetings, some real talk demystifying the process of recovery.The old timers will tell you that long-term sobriety doesn’t necessarily follow the DUI or the divorce, the most catastrophic hangover or humiliating public failure. It often starts on an average day, prompted by nothing other than the thought, “I just can’t do this anymore.”That day never comes in the Deftones sonic universe. The most important piece of Deftones media, both sonically and visually, is the video for “Change (In the House of Flies),” the lead single from their monumental 2000 album White Pony. There are elements of Eyes Wide Shut, the Boogie Nights pool party, that one time in college everyone drank in the kitchen until 5AM, and a Deftones band practice. The drinking and drugging all happen off screen; there’s a brief bit of dancing and everyone just looks extremely hungover if they’re not asleep. Even as we watch ants crawling around people passed out in the most uncomfortable position possible, it’s one of the most effective ad campaigns for cocaine to ever get played on MTV. Most assessments of their rise from rap-metal upstarts to the single most influential contemporary rock band focus on their sonic evolution—how they were able to integrate shoegaze, trip-hop, and quiet storm R&B into metal years ahead of the curve. But these genres are all unified by their sensuality, something glaringly absent from the post-grunge doldrums of the early 2000s, the arch and earnest Obama era, and the alternately circumspect and exploitative current day. The drugs and the sex are illicit and accessible and often impossible to separate from each other. Whether it’s the delirious high or the debilitating comedown, the message remains the same: “I could float here forever.” Chino Moreno finally crashed three years ago.It was a day like any other in 2022, far enough from peak COVID for people to say “back to normal” unironically, even knowing that we’d have to mask up and lock down all over again at a moment’s notice. Deftones knew that dynamic well, having released their ninth album Ohms into a bleak September 2020, and only touring in fits and starts since venues began to open back up a year later.And for the most part, things then were good for Moreno. Better yet, maybe even serene. In the 25 years since their debut Adrenaline, no Deftones album had been met with a more rapturous reception than Ohms. It wasn’t just from the diehards, either. For most of the previous decade, tastemakers might begrudgingly allow that Deftones were the “nu-metal band it’s OK to like.” They liked Sade and covered Japan. They learned their lesson from “Back to School” and stopped rapping entirely after 2000. Crucially, they did not become born-again Christians. Their side projects dabbled in witch house and lap-pop, not “active rock” power ballads. By 2020, a new generation of critics raised on Around the Fur and White Pony lifted Deftones to the rarefied status of The Cure and Smashing Pumpkins, a primary color in alternative rock. An even younger generation turned the insular quintet into something more unexpected: a “big on TikTok” band. After finally escaping the nu-metal tag, Moreno was now subject to inane questions about his thoughts on “baddiecore.” This didn’t happen because of “Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away)” or “Change (In the House of Flies),” but deep cuts from their troubled era of Deftones and Saturday Night Wrist, once defined by rampant drug use, divorce, and flagging sales. Moreno had even opened up in interviews about going into therapy. While forced into quarantine, Moreno held the common belief that their creativity would blossom, that perhaps Deftones wouldn’t be locked into the Olympian cycle of releasing albums every four years. Instead, he’d head down to his studio, dick around for a little bit, get restless and start drinking before noon. Innumerable hard drives were filled with hours and hours of useless music. “There was probably a lot of depression and alcoholism that was created,” Moreno shares from his home in Portland (in the time since Ohms, he relocated from Bend, the artsy Oregon enclave which proved to be too small and understimulating for his racing mind). “Coming out of the pandemic, I still felt isolated and depressed, you know?”For nearly 35 years, Chino Moreno always felt like more. And then he decided he’d had enough.Even if sobriety is the most important thing to happen to Moreno and, consequently, Deftones since Ohms, I don’t want to risk saddling private music with the “sobriety album” label. Similar to the origin story of “Back to School,” Moreno admits that he was inspired to get clean out of spite, just to get people off his back. “I initially started [sobriety] because I wanted to show others that I could not drink, [that] alcohol doesn’t affect me any differently, it’s just part of who I am,” he recalls. “Look at all the success we have, you know what I mean?”private music is not about bottoming out and hanging onto hard-won wisdom, amends and amnesty, or whatever else we’ve come to expect when an artist returns from the brink. Deftones songs are rarely about anything specific. In 35 years, Moreno has never hunched over an acoustic guitar, having a preconceived notion for a song’s subject matter. As drummer Abe Cunningham puts it, “all our songs are feel songs,” ones that need to have a swing and swagger as pure instrumentals before Moreno records his vocals. The other members of Deftones probably won’t know where the music took Moreno until they hear the final mix. They probably won’t even know the song titles, let alone what they mean—“ecdysis,” “cXz,” and “~metal dream” enter the pantheon of Most Deftones-y Deftones Song Titles, alongside recent inductees “Urantia,” “Geometric Headdress,” and “Goon Squad.”The name “private music” itself started as a placeholder for a filesharing folder, and in true Moreno fashion, a nod to his more esoteric tastes; he had stumbled across The Private Music of Tangerine Dream and wondered whether something similar could work for Deftones, ultimately realizing it was just a little too pretentious to fully replicate the title. But the phrase “private music” stuck, to reflect their status as one of the world’s biggest cult bands. Witness the chorus of “Locked Club”—“Join the parade or be left out.” As an added bonus, Cunningham appreciates how, “it does sound a tiny bit seedy” (again, there’s a snake on the cover). At times, Deftones have regretted the way their album art reflects the music. See: the half-naked women gracing Around the Fur and Saturday Night Wrist, heavy-handed voyeurism that felt more exploitative than erotic. But there’s really something about white animals and this band, right? Consider the horse, owl, and snake on, respectively, White Pony, Diamond Eyes, and private music. All of which are works of clean lines, polish, and accessible hooks, and all of which follow predecessors with more turbulent sonics, born of stormy intraband dynamics. Nearly all Deftones albums react to the one that came before and after the monolithic Ohms, here are the most immediate descriptors of private music: aerodynamic, sleek, virile, whatever comes to mind when you see someone for the first time in five years and they’ve got their shit together. Some of the rave reviews have made the subtext the actual text—critics earnestly describing them as “downtuned daddies of sonic sexiness,” things of that nature. This follows naturally from the way Moreno is described by his bandmates: “laser-focused,” “locked in.” There’s a bit in a typically obsequious Zane Lowe interview where Stephen Carpenter praises Moreno’s guitar playing on private music and you can’t see the latter’s reaction; Moreno admits he was beaming, it was the first time he’d ever heard such a compliment. Fittingly, private music is the first Deftones record in over a decade where fans aren’t dissecting Carpenter and Moreno’s relationship from out-of-context interview quotes.The difference this time around is that when the two are at odds—and that’s inevitable with someone you’ve been friends with since you were 10—they’ve learned to deal with it directly and immediately. Moreno thinks back to a recent rehearsal where he called an audible to run through “Sextape,” one of their most enduring contributions to modern, heavy shoegaze. But when you have a guitar rig as complicated as Carpenter’s, you can’t just call an audible. The tone was off, Moreno gave Carpenter a bemused look, Carpenter scowled back and aired out his frustrations once they were done—“every fucking time we start playing and then you throw a song at me, I’m not ready, don’t have the tone for it,” as Moreno recalls. But it didn’t take long for them to remember the sage words of Allen Iverson: We talkin’ about practice. “It was like something that in the past probably would have blown up,” says Moreno, “or no one would have said nothing and then for the next couple hours, everybody would have been pouting—and we were just laughing about two minutes later.” “Here are the most immediate descriptors of private music: aerodynamic, sleek, virile, whatever comes to mind when you see someone for the first time in five years and they’ve got their shit together.”— VICE writer Ian CohenBoth have undergone significant life changes since Ohms; Carpenter revealed he’d been diagnosed with Type II diabetes after nearly crashing out on stage at Coachella in 2024 and has since dedicated himself to a healthier, more sustainable diet and exercise regimen befitting someone who plays a nine-string guitar for hours at a time. With the departure of bassist Sergio Vega, Deftones welcomed Fred Sablan into the fold, a San Jose native who followed the band from their earliest days knocking around the Bay Area to the 2019 Dia de Los Deftones festival in San Diego where he first thought, ‘I wish I was in this band.’Deftones could barely make it through Metallica’s Some Kind of Monster when it was released in 2004, as they went through their most vicious conflicts without a label-funded therapist. Their self-titled album, appearing a year earlier, remains notorious for being their actual cocaine album, as opposed to its predecessor, which merely used a barely veiled euphemism for its title. Though it produced some truly remarkable songs, Deftones is most frequently remembered as the record that cost the band a $1 million penalty for missing label deadlines for deliverables. But they did learn lessons about how to properly welcome the replacement for a dearly departed bassist who became an avatar for the early, “good ol’ days.” Rather than hazing Sablan for the crime of not being Chi Cheng, “we were all collectively really happy,” Sablan recalls. Deftones would typically describe themselves as “proud” or, more often, some variation of “relieved” when their previous albums were finished. Moreno struggled with the dissonance he felt as Koi No Yokan, Ohms, and even the supposedly “much maligned” Gore were met with rave reviews that didn’t feel commensurate with his experience making them. “There were some times where I felt guilty knowing I could be better… if I focused more and, honestly, cared more about what I was doing, instead of that mentality of just wanting to finish a record for the sake of finishing a record,” he admits. They might be happy to be done with the process, but not happy happy, as they are now: “I haven’t felt that way in a while.”Some people experience happiness in early sobriety as a “pink cloud,” a euphoric and overly optimistic period that leads to an inevitable crash.For others like Moreno, any emotion can be disorienting when you have to sit with it, unanesthetized. This is the lesson of the new album’s skyscraping opener “my mind is a mountain,” which Moreno says was inspired by a mindfulness manual for children and its message that emotions are real and we have to deal with them. It’s a tough thing to grasp in private, even more so when “we no longer regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it” plays out in an arena rock show spanning 30 years of music.The first private music gigs have adhered to the same 20-song setlist, all hits, semi-hits, and a sprinkling of new singles, notably excluding Deftones and Gore, the two albums most associated with Deftones carping at each other in the press. But while Saturday Night Wrist was made under even more fraught circumstances, the Gen-Z embrace of “Cherry Waves” has it forever locked in to the same degree as “My Own Summer (Shove It).” The members of Deftones, all now in their fifties, aren’t dismissive of Spotify and TikTok so much as bemused by them. Yet, for all of the ways algorithms try to strip music discovery of its magic, the randomness by which forgotten tracks become late-breaking hits validates Deftones’ past disdain for protracted album rollouts and A&R meetings about “hearing a single.” After the literal millions spent on marketing campaigns and videos that barely dented MTV, it’s funny that a deep cut like “Cherry Waves” is the reason keyboardist and turntablist Frank Delgado’s children are into his music; he admits that his 15-year-old daughter didn’t get into Deftones until her friends did first. This is a common thing now at Deftones meet and greets, figuring out which part of the family unit introduced the band to whom. And, in the near future, maybe it’ll be grandparents. “I do remember a pregnant woman carrying a picture of her mom and dad at a meet and greet years ago,” Cunningham recalls. “Her mom was pregnant and it was all of us holding her mom’s stomach. And now it’s her.”He takes a beat and smiles. “So, Deftones—a family band.”Follow Ian Cohen on X @en_cohenFollow Brandon Bowen on Instagram @brandon.bowenThis is the cover story of the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. You can subscribe to get 4 print issues of the mag each year here.The post Precious Metal: An Interview With Deftones appeared first on VICE.