It was the product of a band who’d already spent more than a decade cementing both their sound, and an obedient following.įormed in 1988 from childhood friends Chino Moreno, Abe Cunningham and Stephen (‘Stef’) Carpenter, Deftones’ early music originated from the buzzing alternative scenes of California’s capital city, Sacramento. By 2000, it was clear that Deftones were operating with a very different manual.Īppearing at the mid-point of the nu-metal paradigm, Deftones’ third record White Pony was a multifaceted statement which faced the looming new century with a weary uncertainty. Balanced out by frequent drops into cataclysmic washes of immense, hypnotic guitar. California’s Deftones vastly surpassed their peers with songs that wrestled with raw self-destructive alienation, coupled with thoughtful arrangements that wandered off into unexpected and progressive directions. Appearing (on paper, at least) to check off all the boxes that would slot them neatly into any nu-metal DJ’s playlist. There was one band however, that turned this perception entirely on its head. But, for former devotees of the grunge era’s tangled sensitivity (and, comparably, those more cerebral corners of the UK’s Britpop era) this pugnacious, jean short-wearing direction for mainstream rock music felt like a regressive step. Though these bands largely were critically slammed, they had an undeniable commercial impact. READ MORE: The Genius Of… Girlfriend by Matthew Sweet.Though there were a few diamonds in this cultural rough, key figureheads of the genre tended to eject any emotional complexity that could undermine its frat-boy bravado. Big on brash swagger, growling anger and backwards baseball caps. Though fusions of hip-hop and rock music had yielded some shining results in the preceding decades (we’re looking at you Faith No More and Rage Against The Machine), that dim age roughly between 19 saw the heyday of acts who’d cherry-picked the gang-chic of hip-hop culture, mangled it with the macho heft of detuned metal guitars, and cobbled together an entirely distinct Frankenstein genre. When looking back at the history of popular music, it’s pretty difficult to find a moment as reviled as that odd period when nu-metal dominated the airwaves.

Deftones albums sold