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Early 00s metal is enjoying a revival, but that alone can’t account for the dramatic surge in commercial fortunes being enjoyed by Deftones. Thirty-one years on from the release of their debut album, they find themselves, as frontman Chino Moreno has put it, “literally bigger than we’ve ever been”. Between the release of 2020’s Ohms and last year’s Private Music their monthly listener figures on Spotify surged from two million to 17 million. The 15,000-capacity venue where they open their UK tour is accordingly heaving.
The reason, with a certain inevitability, is TikTok virality. Tonight, Deftones’ setlist is liberally peppered with tracks ubiquitous on the social media app, from opener Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away) to encore Cherry Waves – although why its users have alighted on them is a matter of conjecture. On fan forums, opinions range from the practical (younger listeners discovered the band after emo rappers sampled their music) to the more earthy: there is discussion of a phenomenon called – dear God - “hornycore” into which the Deftones apparently fit because Moreno has “sexual tones” and is “a fox/daddy”.
Whatever the reason, you can see its effects in the Birmingham crowd: grizzled battle jacket-clad metalheads and people visibly old enough to remember the release of Deftones’ 1997 breakthrough Around the Fur rub shoulders with tweenage goths, any putative parent-scaring qualities about their look – boys in makeup, girls in tights festooned with pentagrams – undermined by the fact that they’re actually here with their parents.
And as Deftones play in front of a giant screen filled with trippy clips from Jodorowsky’s avant-garde arthouse classic Holy Mountain, it’s hard not to think of their renaissance as a good-will-out just reward. If you can see why they got tagged nu-metal 25 years ago – brawny pit-inciting riffs over rhythms that bear a pronounced hip-hop influence – they were, from the start, possessed of both a far wider musical bandwidth and a noticeably different emotional temperature than the genre suggests.
The preponderance of flanged basslines and effects-laden guitar on Change (In the House of Flies) underline more than a passing familiarity with the 80s oeuvre of Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Cure. Elsewhere, on 2006’s Cherry Waves and last year’s Infinite Source alike, the guitars arrive in blurry waves of distortion. Deftones spent considerably more time in the company of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless than their peers, which both demonstrates excellent taste and seems weirdly prescient. In 2026, you can’t move for hazy-sounding music from a variety of genres that you can ultimately trace back to My Bloody Valentine’s innovations: in a sense, Deftones were shoegaze revivalists before there actually was a shoegazing revival.
The effect is incredibly powerful. Rather than temper-tantrum angst, the band’s overall mood is oddly reflective and melancholy: the sound of Moreno’s voice in more recumbent mode – floating above the melee on Hole in the Earth or Locked Club – doesn’t feel sexual so much as wistful. Moreover, it’s an effect they’ve managed to maintain for a long time: if there isn’t any noticeable cooling in the audience’s ardour when the band shift from a beloved old song to something off Private Music, that’s probably because there’s no noticeable dip in musical quality.
Moreover, what they do never feels vintage, like a dispatch from history that brings about a warm glow of nostalgia. There’s nothing beyond their confidence to suggest Deftones are the best part of 40 years away from their formation – “est 1988”, as the T-shirts on the merch stand put it. If a new band came up with something like this – and wrote songs this good – you suspect they’d be doing exceptionally fine business too. Perhaps that’s ultimately what’s at the root of Deftones’ renaissance: their younger fans aren’t buying into a myth of the past, but something that sounds like the present.
