Deftones Review – Metal veterans sound exceptionally fresh in 38 years | Deftones

eIn the early 2000s metal is enjoying a resurgence, but that alone cannot explain the surge in business fortunes enjoyed by Deftones. Thirty-one years after the release of their first album, they find themselves, as singer Chino Moreno says, “literally bigger than we ever were.” Between the release of 2020’s Ohms and last year’s special, Spotify’s monthly listener numbers rose from 2 million to 17 million. So the 15,000 capacity venue where they open their UK tour is growing.

The reason, inevitably, is the popularity of TikTok. Tonight, Deftones’ setlist is full of tracks that are ubiquitous on the social media app, from opener Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away) to encore Cherry Waves – although why its users descended 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 earthier: there’s discussion of a phenomenon called – dear God – “hornycore,” which the Deftones seem to fit into because Moreno has “sexual undertones” and is a “fox/daddy.”

Whatever the reason, you can see traces of it in the Birmingham crowd: blackheads in combat jackets, people who look old enough to remember the release of the 1997 Deftones film about furs, interacting with teenage goths, and any supposed parent-intimidating qualities in their appearance – boys in make-up, girls in tights decorated with pentagrams – are undermined by the fact that they are actually here with their parents.

And as Deftones play in front of a giant screen filled with trippy clips from Jodorowsky’s classic Holy Mountain, it’s hard not to think of their renaissance as merely a reward for good faith. If you can see why they were classified as nu-metal 25 years ago – stringy riffs over beats bearing a clear hip-hop influence – they have from the beginning had a much broader musical range and a markedly different emotional temperature than the genre suggests.

The predominance of edged bass lines and effects-laden guitar on Change (In the House of Flies) confirms more than a passing familiarity with the 1980s work of Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Cure. Elsewhere, on both 2006’s Cherry Waves and last year’s Infinite Source, the guitars arrive in blurry waves of distortion. The Deftones have spent far more time in the company of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless than their peers, which both demonstrate excellent taste and seem strangely prescient. In 2026, you can’t move to fuzzy-sounding music from a variety of genres that you can ultimately trace back to My Bloody Valentine’s innovations: in a sense, Deftones were proponents of the shoegaze revival before there was actually a shoegaze revival.

The effect is incredibly powerful. Rather than a fit of angst and rage, the band’s overall mood is strangely reflective and melancholic: Moreno’s voice is in a more reclined mode – floating above the fray of Hole in the Earth or Locked Club – sounding not so much sexual as wistful. Moreover, it’s an effect they’ve been able to maintain for a long time: if there’s no noticeable cooling in audience enthusiasm when the band switches from a beloved old song to something out of their own music, it’s probably because there’s no noticeable drop in musical quality.

What’s more, what they do never feels outdated, like a message from history that brings a warm glow of nostalgia. There’s nothing too self-confident to suggest that Deftones are the better part of 40 years apart from their formation – “in 1988,” as the T-shirts on the merchandise stand say. If a new band came up with something like this—and wrote songs this good—you suspect they’d do exceptionally well, too. Perhaps this is ultimately the root of Deftones’ renaissance: their younger fans believe not in the myth of the past, but in something resembling the present.