There’s something both touching and absurd about watching Deftones step into 2025 like aging skaters who, instead of breaking ankles on half-pipes, are still pulling tricks no one expected them to land. Once upon a time they were the soundtrack to bedrooms where posters curled at the edges and ashtrays overflowed; now they’re an institution, the kind that sells out arenas without needing to release a new record every other year. Private Music, their tenth album, doesn’t pretend to seduce the unbelievers. It exists more like a private ritual: familiar gestures, familiar ghosts, a language spoken fluently among those who already know the words.
The record begins by reassuring you that yes, the old alchemy is still intact: Stef Carpenter grinding riffs so heavy they bend the floorboards, Chino Moreno sliding between whispers and howls as if his lungs had more than one register of pain. Yet there’s an odd looseness here, an energy that feels less like calculation and more like instinct. My Mind Is A Mountain rewinds Diamond Eyes and plays it back in slow motion, while cXz jitters between dream-chorus and percussive stabs, never giving the listener the easy lift-off they expect. It’s this tension—the refusal to pay out the full reward—that makes the album oddly compulsive.
Still, Private Music is not a revelation. The gloss of Nick Raskulinecz’s production sometimes gilds the edges too cleanly, like a high-definition filter on a photograph that might have looked better smudged. And while Chino experiments with vocal colors—snarling, crooning, sighing—the risk of déjà vu is never far away. Deftones have always thrived on the pull between brutality and romance, but here the formula occasionally feels like well-worn choreography.
And yet, when it clicks, it’s hard not to be swept along. Souvenir stretches into six minutes of storm-lit intimacy, while Cut Hands revives the rap-metal ghost with such swagger that you almost forgive history for mocking the genre. The closing Departing the Body lingers like breath on a cold window: fragile, unsettling, strangely comforting.
Private Music doesn’t crown a new peak in their career, nor does it tumble into irrelevance. It’s a solid, sometimes thrilling reminder of why Deftones remain a band people argue about on Reddit with religious fervor. At this point in their saga, that might be victory enough.