In November 1985, a fifteen-year-old Stephen Carpenter was hit by a car. He was on a skateboard in Sacramento, California, when a vehicle struck him at speed. The impact did serious damage to his lower body, and he spent the months that followed in a wheelchair, with not very much to do.
His mum bought him a guitar.
That guitar is where Deftones starts. Not in a rehearsal room, not at a gig, not with a teenage epiphany about the meaning of music. It starts with a fifteen-year-old kid in a wheelchair teaching himself power chords by playing along to Anthrax, Stormtroopers of Death and Metallica records, because there wasn't much else available. By the time Carpenter could walk again, he could play riffs most kids spend years trying to nail. He'd done nothing else for months.
Forty years later, Deftones are one of the biggest heavy bands on the planet. Private Music, their tenth album, sold 47,000 vinyl copies in its first US week in 2025, broke every commercial record they'd previously set, and earned them a Grammy nomination. Teenagers on TikTok call them "baddiecore" and use White Pony deep cuts in their slow-motion edits. Their festival sets headline above bands who used to headline above them.
Getting from one place to the other took thirty-something years, two near-fatal accidents, a shelved album that most fans have never heard, and a refusal to ever quite sound like the bands they were lumped in with.
The Sacramento years
Carpenter went back to school. The injuries stayed with him for life, but the wheelchair years gave him a head start that the other kids in Sacramento had no answer to. At C.K. McClatchy High School he met Chino Moreno, a quiet, intense student who liked hardcore punk, hip-hop, and a lot of music heavier kids would never admit to liking. They got on. They started a band.
Drummer Abe Cunningham came in soon after, and a friend called Chi Cheng joined on bass. Chi was tall, charismatic, generous with his time, and quickly became the social heart of the group. Frank Delgado would arrive a few years later as the band's turntablist and eventually as a full member playing keys and atmospheric textures. The five of them, in various combinations, would stay together until tragedy forced one change.
They called themselves Deftones, a name Carpenter coined by sticking the hip-hop slang "def" onto the suffix "-tones" (the result was also a pun on "tone deaf"). The early gigs were skate parks, house parties and small clubs across Sacramento. The sound was a strange thing for the early 90s: hardcore aggression sitting next to genuine melody, with Chino swooning over riffs that should have been knocking him over.
The bands they loved tell you everything. Cocteau Twins. The Cure. Depeche Mode. My Bloody Valentine. The most ethereal, melodic, dreamlike artists imaginable, paired with Chino's other devotion to East Coast hip-hop and Carpenter's love of Helmet and Meshuggah. The friction between those impulses became the entire band. Carpenter wanted the heaviest riffs imaginable. Chino wanted everything to float. Both sometimes won.
In 1994, after years of local gigs and demo tapes circulating in the right hands, they signed to Maverick Records, Madonna's label, of all things, run as her vanity imprint through Warner Bros. It was an odd home for a heavy band, but Maverick was hungry, the deal was fair, and Deftones got to make their first record on a major.
The Maverick years
Adrenaline (1995)
The producer was Terry Date, the man who'd already shaped Vulgar Display of Power by Pantera and Badmotorfinger by Soundgarden, and who would now spend a decade as the closest thing Deftones had to a sixth member. Date understood that the band needed to sound enormous without losing the vulnerability underneath. He let Carpenter's guitar feel like a wall while leaving Chino's voice room to break apart at the edges.
Adrenaline did the things first albums are supposed to do. It captured a band figuring out who they were in real time. The ferocity of "Bored" sits next to the strange tenderness of "Engine No. 9." Chino's lyrics swung between hardcore intensity and something more confessional, often in the same line. The album sold steadily, gathered a cult, and put Deftones on tour with Korn, the relationship that would shape the next five years of their public image.
Because Korn were exploding in the mid-90s, and the press needed a category. The category became nu-metal. Deftones were filed under it without much consultation. Chino has spent the rest of his career politely pointing out that this never made sense. The band were always too melodic, too obsessed with shoegaze textures, too uninterested in baggy shorts and football imagery, to belong in the same room as the bands they kept ending up on tours with. But labels stick.
Around the Fur (1997)
Two years later they made the leap. Around the Fur opens with "My Own Summer (Shove It)". The riff is one of those things that sounds like a sigh and a punch at once, all coiled tension and tropical heat. The song became the band's first proper hit, the first time MTV gave them rotation that mattered. Producer Terry Date returned, and you can hear the band's confidence in every track. The dynamics are wider. The quiet bits are quieter. The loud bits sound dangerous.
Sergio Vega from Quicksand, the New York post-hardcore band whose 1995 album Manic Compression still sounds ahead of its time, sang backing vocals on "Lotion," which is one of those Deftones bookends that feels almost designed in retrospect. Vega had no idea he'd end up replacing Chi a decade later. Nobody did.
"Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)" was the other moment that announced something. The song built itself around Chino's whisper, and the loud parts felt earned rather than dropped in. Deftones started getting written about by people who didn't write about heavy music. The band had begun to slip the category.
Sausalito
White Pony (2000)
White Pony is the album. It's the one most fans agree is their masterpiece, the one Gen Z teenagers stumbled onto two decades after release and turned into a TikTok phenomenon, the one that finally proved the nu-metal label was nonsense.
Frank Delgado was now a full member. Terry Date was back. The band decamped to The Plant Recording Studios in Sausalito and worked on the album for four months, longer than any of their previous records combined. They were trying to make something that didn't sit comfortably anywhere. They succeeded.
"Change (In the House of Flies)" became the band's biggest commercial hit. It's also one of the strangest songs to ever do that. The song is hypnotic, queasy, sensual in a way mainstream rock radio rarely accommodates. Maynard James Keenan, the singer of Tool, guests on "Passenger," a duet that doesn't sound like anything either band had done before. The album won the Grammy for Best Metal Performance the following year, for the track "Elite."
Deftones spent the late 90s being told they were a nu-metal band, and used White Pony to politely point out that they had never agreed to that.
There's a story buried in the album's release that captures the band perfectly. The original White Pony came out without an obvious radio single, in a tracklist the band were proud of. The label thought it lacked one. Months later, after pressure, the band wrote and recorded "Back to School (Mini Maggit)", a track that reworked the riff from "Pink Maggit" into something more conventional. The album was reissued with the new song tacked on at the start. Chino has been honest about how much he disliked having to do it. Most fans now consider the original sequence the canonical version. Vinyl reissues tend to follow it.
White Pony didn't just save Deftones from being a footnote in the late-90s heavy boom. It made them an art band who happened to play heavy music, which is a genuinely difficult thing to be.
The middle years
Self-titled (2003) and Saturday Night Wrist (2006)
After White Pony, the band came home, took stock, and made Deftones, a self-titled album that doubled down on aggression. It was angrier and more compressed than White Pony, and a few of the fans who'd come in via "Change" were thrown by it. The lead single "Minerva" became one of their most-loved songs, but the album as a whole reads now as a band processing exhaustion through volume.
The tensions caught up with them on Saturday Night Wrist. The album took years to make. Chino was struggling. There are interviews where he's been frank about depression and substance use during this period, and his side project Team Sleep was eating up his attention. Carpenter has spoken about the sessions feeling fractured. The album they ended up with is uneven but features some of their most beautiful moments, including "Hole in the Earth," which sounds like a band staring into something they're not sure they'll come back from.
They needed a reset. They got one, in the worst possible way.
November 4, 2008
Diamond Eyes (2010)
On 4 November 2008, in Santa Clara, California, Chi Cheng was in a single-vehicle car accident. He suffered a serious traumatic brain injury and never fully recovered. For most of the years that followed, he existed in what doctors describe as a minimally conscious state, with occasional lucid moments his family treasured but no return to the person he had been before. He died on 13 April 2013.
The band were in the middle of recording a new album when it happened. The record was called Eros, and it was largely finished. The band shelved it. Chino has explained the decision over the years in fragments. The music had been made with Chi present and contributing, and to release it felt wrong. They put it away. Most fans have never heard it. Bootlegs have leaked, but the band have never blessed an official release, and Chino has indicated they may never.
Sergio Vega, the same Sergio Vega who'd sung backing vocals on "Lotion" thirteen years earlier, stepped in as touring bassist and stayed for over a decade. The band, devastated and unsure how to move forward, did the only thing that made sense to them. They wrote a new album from scratch. They called it Diamond Eyes.
Diamond Eyes is one of the most remarkable albums in their catalogue precisely because of what it isn't. It isn't angry, or bitter, or defeated. It's bright. It opens with the title track and a riff that sounds like sunlight breaking through, and across the next forty minutes the band sound like people choosing to keep going. They play with more space than they had in years. Chino sings with a tenderness that hadn't been there since White Pony. The album is a love letter to a friend who was still alive and might still come back. It is, by some distance, the most hopeful record they ever made.
When Chi died two years later, Diamond Eyes became something else again. The band have been careful never to mythologise it. They've never made his absence a marketing line. They've also never replaced him in the way most bands replace bassists. Sergio Vega stayed for over a decade before parting ways in early 2021. Fred Sablan, who'd previously played with Marilyn Manson and Goon Moon, took over on tour and made his recording debut on Private Music. Through every change, Chi Cheng remains the bassist on every record up to and including Saturday Night Wrist, and that's the way Deftones still talk about him.
The 2010s
Koi No Yokan, Gore, and Ohms
Koi No Yokan arrived in 2012. The title is a Japanese phrase that translates roughly as the feeling, on first meeting someone, that you will inevitably fall in love with them at some future point. Not love at first sight, but something stranger: a premonition of love. The album is widely considered the band's second-best record, and a lot of fans rate it higher. Songs like "Tempest," "Romantic Dreams" and "Entombed" stretch their dynamic range further than they had in years. It is, quietly, one of the most beautiful heavy albums of the 2010s.
Gore came in 2016 and almost broke the band. The recording was difficult. Carpenter has said in interviews he didn't enjoy the process, didn't connect with the songs, and spent much of the album questioning whether he wanted to continue with Deftones at all. He's softened his position since, but the public airing of those tensions was the most visible the band's internal arguments had ever been. Gore has its devotees, and its dreamier passages have aged well.
Ohms (2020)
Ohms, in 2020, repaired everything. Terry Date returned for his first finished Deftones album since their self-titled record in 2003 (he had also worked on the unreleased Eros sessions in 2008). The album felt purposeful and confident in a way nothing they'd done since Diamond Eyes had. It dropped during the strangest year in living memory, and a lot of fans found in it a steadiness they desperately needed. "Ceremony" and the title track became immediate live staples. The band were back.
What none of them realised was that the next album would be the one to break them open commercially in a way they'd never managed before.
Private Music and the 2025 moment
Private Music (2025)
Something started happening on TikTok around 2022. Younger listeners, mostly women, started using "Sextape" from the 2010 album in slow-motion edits soundtracking what got loosely labelled "baddiecore", a hyper-feminine, sensual, lonely-girl aesthetic. The Deftones song that fitted best was the one nobody had pushed as a single. The algorithm did the rest. Streams of White Pony deep cuts started climbing. A whole generation of listeners arrived who had never heard Deftones called nu-metal, and never would.
By the time Private Music arrived in 2025, the audience for it was larger than the band had ever played to. The album moved 47,000 vinyl copies in its first US week, broke the band's previous records by a wide margin, and earned them a Grammy nomination. Songs like "My Mind Is a Mountain" became immediate live anthems. Private Music was covered as a major release by publications that had previously treated Deftones as a niche concern. The band, now in their fifties, found themselves bigger than they'd been at thirty.
The same year, White Pony turned twenty-five. The reissue campaign and anniversary tour brought even more attention. Festival headliner slots that would once have gone to bands several rungs above Deftones now went to them. The wheelchair guitar had reached a point its teenage owner could not have plausibly imagined.
What it took to get here
The Deftones story doesn't have a clean shape. It has Stephen Carpenter in a wheelchair learning the instrument that would define him. It has Chi Cheng, a giant of a man, falling silent at 38 and never coming back. It has a band who refused, year after year, to fit any of the boxes available to them, who lost a brother and made the brightest album of their lives in his honour, who almost broke up over an album that wasn't very good, and who finally became a global phenomenon thirty years in.
It has been, throughout, a band who liked the wrong things. Cocteau Twins instead of Korn. Sade instead of Slipknot. The slow, drifting end of "Knife Prty" instead of the breakdown that nu-metal demanded. Every choice they made that felt like the wrong commercial move turned out, eventually, to be the thing that gave them a second life.
You can build a serious vinyl collection out of Deftones albums. White Pony alone has more pressings than most bands manage in a career, and the original 2000 sequence remains the version most worth chasing. Diamond Eyes on coloured vinyl is one of the best-sounding heavy records of the last fifteen years. Private Music, fresh enough that the variants are still in print, will be a collector's pursuit in five years' time, so picking up a copy now is the move. They are also one of the bands carrying the metal section of the 2025 chart, if you want to see who they're keeping company with.
Forty years from a kid in a wheelchair to one of the biggest rock acts of the decade. Most bands don't survive their first record. Deftones survived their second life.