Rating: 9 / 10 Stars
DEFTONES is: Chino Moreno (Vocals and Guitars), Stephen Carpenter (Guitars), Frank Delgado (Keyboards, Samples, and Turntables), Abe Cunningham (Drums), and Fred Sablan (Bass)
REVIEW – There are few bands in heavy music whose silence can feel as loud as their distortion. DEFTONES have always existed in that strange atmospheric space between pressure and absence, between the body and the dream, between violence and intimacy. With private music, set to arrive August 22, 2025 through Reprise / Warner Records, the Sacramento icons prepare to open the door on their tenth studio album, and the title alone feels perfectly Deftones: exclusive, secretive, sensual, half-confession and half-warning. Warner’s announcement confirms the album as an 11-track set produced by Nick Raskulinecz, reuniting the band with the producer behind Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan.
That reunion matters. Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan occupy a special place in the band’s modern mythology because they captured Deftones not as a nostalgia act reaching backward, but as a band reshaping grief, beauty, low-end crush, and dreamlike atmosphere into something newly alive. To return to Raskulinecz now suggests a desire not simply to recapture that chemistry, but to refine it through everything the band have become since. private music follows Ohms, and while that record reaffirmed Deftones’ ability to sound vast, serrated, and emotionally unstable after decades of evolution, this new album appears to move with a leaner, more immediate pulse.
The title private music began, according to Chino Moreno, as the name of a desktop folder where ideas were stored during the writing process. That origin is almost comically ordinary, but in Deftones’ hands it becomes loaded with implication. Private music sounds like something forbidden, something made behind a locked door, something too personal to play in public but too powerful to keep hidden. Moreno has described liking the name’s exclusivity and its restricted, almost naughty connotations, and that makes sense. Deftones have always understood desire as atmosphere. Their songs often feel like they are overheard rather than performed, as if the listener has wandered into a room where something beautiful and dangerous is already happening.
Written and recorded over roughly two and a half years across locations including Nashville, Joshua Tree, and Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu, private music appears to carry geography in its bloodstream. The desert, the ocean, the studio room, the road, the early-morning guitar idea, the late-night playback—these are not just production details. They feel like emotional climates. Deftones have never sounded tied to one physical place. They sound like interiors: rooms, bodies, memories, fever dreams, headlights, water, concrete, skin. This album’s creation across multiple spaces only deepens that sense of movement and dislocation.
The lead single and opening track “my mind is a mountain” is exactly the kind of title only Deftones could make feel physical. The phrase turns thought into geography, anxiety into mass, consciousness into something immovable and dangerous. Born from a studio jam, the song has been compared by Stephen Carpenter to the kind of organic formation that produced “Change”, one of the band’s signature pieces. That comparison is not casual. It suggests a track that did not arrive through overthinking, but through chemistry: musicians in a room finding a shape together before anyone fully understood what it meant.
Moreno has described “my mind is a mountain” as bombastic and built around a push-and-pull he loves, and that push-and-pull has always been Deftones’ central magic. Heavy, but not blunt. Beautiful, but not soft. Grooving enough to move the head, but unstable enough to unsettle the body. The song’s title and placement make it feel like the album’s gateway into psychological terrain where thought becomes terrain, burden becomes altitude, and the only way forward is upward through distortion.
“locked club” follows with a title that immediately evokes exclusion, secrecy, sweat, velvet rope, danger, and bodies moving in a room not everyone is allowed to enter. Deftones have flirted with nocturnal sensuality for decades, but they rarely treat the club as mere pleasure. In their universe, rooms throb with longing and threat. A locked club is not only a place of dancing. It is a chamber of containment. It is nightlife as enclosure, desire as code, intimacy as something guarded.
“ecdysis” brings one of the album’s most evocative images. Ecdysis is the shedding of an outer layer, the molting of skin, the abandonment of an old casing. For Deftones, that metaphor feels almost too perfect. This is a band that has spent its career evolving without ever discarding its essence. They shed skins, but the pulse remains unmistakable. A song with this title suggests transformation as discomfort, rebirth as exposure, and growth as something that leaves the body tender before it becomes strong.
“infinite source” carries an origin-point significance, having been identified as the first song written for the album. Carpenter brought the initial idea into the process in Nashville before the band continued shaping it on tour, and that traveling evolution gives the song a feeling of momentum before anyone has heard the full album in sequence. The title implies something eternal, generative, almost spiritual. But Deftones rarely approach transcendence cleanly. Their infinite source is likely not pure light. It is a current running through distortion, exhaustion, desire, memory, and the strange electricity that keeps a band alive after decades of pressure.
“souvenir” is the longest track here, stretching past six minutes, and its title suggests memory made physical. A souvenir is proof that something happened, but it is also a poor substitute for the experience itself. In Deftones’ world, memory is rarely stable. It blurs, eroticizes, decays, returns with teeth. At this length, “souvenir” feels positioned as one of the album’s deeper immersions, the kind of song that may move less like a single and more like weather. Deftones have always known how to make repetition feel hypnotic rather than static, and this track appears ready to lean into that expansive quality.
“cXz” sits on the track list like a glitch, a code fragment, an interruption in language. Deftones have long embraced abstraction in titles, tones, and textures, but “cXz” feels especially private, almost inaccessible. That may be the point. Not every song title needs to announce its meaning. Some are meant to function as symbols, shapes, or locked files. On an album called private music, a title like this feels like a password the listener may never fully decode.
“i think about you all the time” arrives from a quieter origin. Moreno has described writing the idea after a morning near Shangri-La, walking to the ocean, returning barefoot, and later asking to record what he had found. That story gives the song a soft human glow before it even plays. The title is plainspoken, almost devastatingly so. Deftones are often associated with abstraction, but some of their most powerful moments come when Moreno cuts through the fog with a direct emotional phrase. “i think about you all the time” sounds like obsession without theatrics, love without certainty, memory without relief.
“milk of the madonna” is described as a thunderous Deftones banger, and the title is rich with religious, bodily, maternal, and blasphemous imagery. It suggests nourishment and iconography, purity and excess, sanctity and flesh. That is fertile ground for a band that has always found beauty in contradiction. Moreno’s emotional tenor over a swirling, writhing tempest sounds exactly like the Deftones alchemy that continues to resist imitation: the voice floating above the wreckage, not untouched by it, but illuminated by the violence beneath.
“cut hands” brings the album into sharper bodily territory. Deftones song titles often feel tactile, and this one is all pain, contact, consequence. Hands are instruments of touch, labor, violence, affection, and creation. Cut hands imply that even reaching has a cost. In a Deftones song, that image can become romantic, brutal, erotic, or spiritual depending on the light hitting it. The title alone suggests intimacy damaged by contact.
“~metal dream” feels like a perfect late-album contradiction. Metal and dream: weight and vapor, machinery and sleep, impact and unreality. The stylized tilde gives it a drifting, unstable quality, as if the song is not quite fixed in place. Deftones have always been one of heavy music’s great dream bands, not because they are soft, but because their heaviness often behaves like subconscious material. It arrives distorted, symbolic, and emotionally charged before the listener can fully explain why.
The closing track “departing the body” may be the most haunting title in the sequence. It suggests dissociation, death, transcendence, trauma, ecstasy, or release. As a nearly six-minute closer, it appears ready to leave the album not with a clean ending, but with separation: self from body, sound from source, listener from the room they entered at the beginning. Deftones have always been masters of the suspended final moment, the feeling that a song has ended but the atmosphere remains. “departing the body” sounds like it may become one of those exits that does not fully let you leave.
What makes private music so compelling ahead of its arrival is the sense that Deftones are not trying to compete with their own influence. That influence is everywhere now. Entire waves of modern heavy, alternative, shoegaze-metal, post-hardcore, and atmospheric rock bands have borrowed pieces of the Deftones vocabulary: the breathy vocal intimacy, the low-end crush, the erotic dread, the sharp left turns into beauty, the sense of being underwater and on fire at the same time. But influence is not the same as presence. Deftones still sound like the source because they never reduced themselves to a formula.
Chino Moreno remains one of heavy music’s most singular vocalists because he does not treat melody and aggression as opposing modes. His voice is atmosphere, confession, seduction, panic, and apparition. Stephen Carpenter’s guitar work continues to provide the band’s seismic foundation, turning riffs into architecture rather than ornament. Abe Cunningham remains one of rock’s most underrated rhythmic forces, capable of making heaviness swing, lurch, breathe, and snap. Frank Delgado’s textures are essential to the band’s dream logic, adding the fog, circuitry, and peripheral glow that make Deftones songs feel inhabited. Fred Sablan’s bass presence on this album further reinforces the low-end gravity of this era. Album credits list the core band with Sablan contributing bass, alongside production from Deftones and Raskulinecz.
The beauty of private music as a title is that it does not mean small music. Deftones have never needed to sound small to feel intimate. Their most private moments often arrive at enormous volume. They make songs that feel whispered even when the guitars are collapsing the walls. They make desire sound like weather and memory sound like distortion. This album appears poised to continue that tradition while sharpening it into one of their leanest and most focused modern statements.
With private music, Deftones seem ready to deliver another late-career work that does not chase relevance because relevance has already bent toward them. They are not trying to become younger, louder, trendier, or more legible. They are doing something harder: continuing to sound unmistakably like themselves while letting the shadows shift around the frame. If the title promises restricted access, then the music may be the invitation slipped under the door.
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