When NME meets Chino Moreno on Zoom in mid-August, the Deftones frontman is resplendent in the much sought-after black Oasis Adidas football shirt from their recent reunion tour merch line. “It’s actually my wife’s,” he cheerfully admits. “She got me one too, but it was a little too big. I like this one, so I borrowed it. She actually got to go to the first show.”
Moreno, a huge Oasis fan, tells NME he’ll get to see the Gallaghers himself when they play Chicago at the end of this month. Maybe he’ll have a run-in with LG himself. They’ve met once before, after which Liam took to social media to call Chino “a dude”. “Oh, I saw that!” exclaims Moreno. “I had to ask [my PR] what that meant. I was like, ‘Is that good? Is that bad?’”
For Liam, that’s very, very good.
“Awesome, I love it!”
While the buckethatted masses have the Gallaghers, lovers of the Sacramento art-metallers are certainly having a ‘Deftones Summer’. The band have been playing some of the biggest shows of their career, with more to come, all to celebrate their resplendent 10th album ‘Private Music’ – hailed by NME as a direct reminder of “the band as masters of beauty and brutality rolling over the horizon in one stunning but powerful storm” and “a gift for fans old, new, and certainly finding them in the very distant future”.
Having new and future fans shouldn’t be taken for granted. Few artists of Deftones’ years – 37, to be precise – are able to reach new generations in the way that they have. Tracks including ‘Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away)’, ‘Sextape’ and ‘Cherry Waves’ have all taken on a second life of their own by going viral on TikTok recently. Though, this new form of success hasn’t made a dent on the new record.
“Even if we thought about it that way – ‘Oh, we need to make something for everybody’ – I think we’d be fooling ourselves to think we had a formula to do that,” says Moreno. But what’s the secret sauce for this? “The answer is that I don’t know. I would like to think that it is because we’ve written good songs that have stood the test of time and transcend generations.
“I can say that without sounding arrogant about Oasis, too: that’s why their shows are what they are and why they have this broad demographic there. They write great songs. I’m not saying we write as great a song as they do, but I’m saying that if you go through a catalogue, there are a handful of songs that transcend time.”
“Oasis write great songs. I’m not saying we write as great a song as they do, but if you go through a catalogue, there are a handful of songs that transcend time”
With a five-year wait since predecessor ‘Ohms’, ‘Private Music’ carries that same timeless feel, and it comes from taking their time. The band have been through a lot in their years. They recently saw the departure of bassist Sergio Vega – who stepped in after the late, great Chi Cheng fell into a coma in 2008 following a car crash, before his death in 2013.
Now, they’ve earned the privilege of living by their own rules, to their own deadlines, able to just get together and really “enjoy” their time together to make music. “It’s nice because that’s as close as it gets to that clubhouse feeling from our youth when we’d all get together in Stephen [Carpenter, guitarist]’s garage or rent a little lockup spot.”
After working with Matt Hyde for 2016’s ‘Gore’ and frequent collaborator Terry Date – the man who helmed the now-classic ‘Around The Fur’, ‘White Pony’ and self-titled – for ‘Ohms’, another familiar face returned to steer the good ship Deftones. Nick Raskulinecz previously produced the band’s standout mid-career revival albums, ‘Diamond Eyes’ (2010) and ‘Koi No Yokan’ (2012), and Moreno says reuniting with him was largely “just to have someone with us in the room who was really good at keeping us sort of focused”.
“No slight to Terry Date because he’s a great producer, but he’s more of an engineer than someone who actually gets involved in the songwriting and structuring. Nick is great at stopping us and challenging us to hone in on what the initial spirit of what we were doing was.”
As a result, ‘Private Music’ cuts to the core of Deftones with brute force, tenderness and mystique, making for one inescapable tempest. Its title (in lower case, along with all song titles just for “the aesthetic”) may have simply come from a folder on Moreno’s desktop (and could just have easily been called “‘Shit I Need To Get Done ASAP’”, he jokes), but it speaks to the soul of the album. “It feels like something very secret, special and elite that only you’re let into.”
There’s a bolshy drive, effortless energy and spiritual feel to the record that imbues a sense of hope, in a very Deftones way, of course. Moreno agrees: “It feels confident. When you’re not confident, you second-guess yourself a lot, and you’re not doing you. Looking back on these last two records – and I think they’re good records – I knew deep down that if we put in the work, we could smash those two records creatively.”
Teaming up with Raskulinecz again, he adds, helped recapture a certain muse: “I think that ‘Diamond Eyes’ and ‘Koi [No Yokan]’ were us doing that exact same thing with the two previous records before that. I felt that we were at that stage again where we wanted to reflect a little bit and see how we could stretch forward and expand on everything we’d done up to this point.”
“‘Private Music’ feels like something very secret, special and elite that only you’re let into”
At the heart of ‘Private Music’ is ‘I Think About You All The Time’ – a sexy and tender little tearjerker that feels like the sequel of ‘Sextape’. Like the aforementioned viral ‘Diamond Eyes’ gem, the feeling started to flow and took over as soon as Moreno heard the opening chords. “That’s a very warm-feeling song,” the frontman says. “I’d probably best describe it as having someone’s arms thrown around you and the way that feels. I was scribbling out words that depict that.”
While Deftones’ music has always been vulnerable (he points as far back to ‘Mascara’ on ‘Around The Fur’ for proof of that), Moreno admits that his confidence to lay himself out in a love song has grown. Speaking to NME around the time of ‘Ohms’, he told us about turning to therapy. Now, more connected to his feelings than ever, he feels a closer connection to the music.
“Honestly, I’m no expert in mental health, but speaking for myself, doing therapy and sobriety as well – which has been a big thing for me to achieve in these last few years – obviously it was kind of scary in the beginning,” he admits. “Then once you break that wall down and realise, ‘Oh, I’m probably more creative than I’ve been in the past and a little bit more in tune with what’s going on, with my emotions’. Now I think it’s easier. I used to believe that maybe I had to be in an altered state of mind to have this creative thing.
“Overall, having a bit of clarity and still being able to be creative – it feels more pristine. It’s more polished and it’s more honest, in a weird way.”
Not many bands reach their peak as a live band in their fifties, but Deftones are on fire. Find out for yourself on their massive 2026 arena tour or, if you’re lucky enough to attend, their now legendary Dia De Los Deftones festival in San Diego, which this year boasts a fittingly genre-defying line-up including Clipse, 2Hollis, Rico Nasty and Deafheaven. It’s always a wild combo, but it makes sense in the Venn diagram of Deftones. “When I make a mixtape or a playlist, you add one thing then another to either complement or offset that,” he says of curating the bill. “It’s a mix because it’s not just supposed to be one thing the whole time.”
Genre, time, age, space, whatever. All Deftones need now is for it to feel right. “I definitely feel a lot more present, for obvious reasons,” ends Moreno. “After all this time, we’re really able to reflect and be grateful that, at this age and this stage of our lives, we’re able to be creative and have people care.
“Multiple generations are into what we’re doing. When I’m on stage, it is inspiring to look out there and see fresh faces, and familiar faces as well. I don’t think that’s something that any of us anticipated.”
Do it for yourself and live in the now. That’s all it really takes to make something that’ll live forever.
Deftones’ new album ‘Private Music’ is out now via Reprise/Warner
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