UNLOCKED: Precious Metal — An Interview With Deftones

Rock bottom is when you stop digging—that’s something you hear in rehabs and 12-step meetings, some real talk demystifying the process of recovery.

The old timers will tell you that long-term sobriety doesn’t necessarily follow the DUI or the divorce, the most catastrophic hangover or humiliating public failure. It often starts on an average day, prompted by nothing other than the thought, “I just can’t do this anymore.”

That day never comes in the Deftones sonic universe. The most important piece of Deftones media, both sonically and visually, is the video for “Change (In the House of Flies),” the lead single from their monumental 2000 album White Pony. There are elements of Eyes Wide Shut, the Boogie Nights pool party, that one time in college everyone drank in the kitchen until 5AM, and a Deftones band practice. The drinking and drugging all happen off screen; there’s a brief bit of dancing and everyone just looks extremely hungover if they’re not asleep. Even as we watch ants crawling around people passed out in the most uncomfortable position possible, it’s one of the most effective ad campaigns for cocaine to ever get played on MTV. 

Most assessments of their rise from rap-metal upstarts to the single most influential contemporary rock band focus on their sonic evolution—how they were able to integrate shoegaze, trip-hop, and quiet storm R&B into metal years ahead of the curve. But these genres are all unified by their sensuality, something glaringly absent from the post-grunge doldrums of the early 2000s, the arch and earnest Obama era, and the alternately circumspect and exploitative current day. The drugs and the sex are illicit and accessible and often impossible to separate from each other. Whether it’s the delirious high or the debilitating comedown, the message remains the same: “I could float here forever.” 

Chino Moreno finally crashed three years ago.

It was a day like any other in 2022, far enough from peak COVID for people to say “back to normal” unironically, even knowing that we’d have to mask up and lock down all over again at a moment’s notice. Deftones knew that dynamic well, having released their ninth album Ohms into a bleak September 2020, and only touring in fits and starts since venues began to open back up a year later.

And for the most part, things then were good for Moreno. Better yet, maybe even serene. In the 25 years since their debut Adrenaline, no Deftones album had been met with a more rapturous reception than Ohms. It wasn’t just from the diehards, either. For most of the previous decade, tastemakers might begrudgingly allow that Deftones were the “nu-metal band it’s OK to like.” They liked Sade and covered Japan. They learned their lesson from “Back to School” and stopped rapping entirely after 2000. Crucially, they did not become born-again Christians. Their side projects dabbled in witch house and lap-pop, not “active rock” power ballads.

By 2020, a new generation of critics raised on Around the Fur and White Pony lifted Deftones to the rarefied status of The Cure and Smashing Pumpkins, a primary color in alternative rock. An even younger generation turned the insular quintet into something more unexpected: a “big on TikTok” band. After finally escaping the nu-metal tag, Moreno was now subject to inane questions about his thoughts on “baddiecore.” This didn’t happen because of “Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away)” or “Change (In the House of Flies),” but deep cuts from their troubled era of Deftones and Saturday Night Wrist, once defined by rampant drug use, divorce, and flagging sales. Moreno had even opened up in interviews about going into therapy. 

While forced into quarantine, Moreno held the common belief that their creativity would blossom, that perhaps Deftones wouldn’t be locked into the Olympian cycle of releasing albums every four years. Instead, he’d head down to his studio, dick around for a little bit, get restless and start drinking before noon. Innumerable hard drives were filled with hours and hours of useless music. “There was probably a lot of depression and alcoholism that was created,” Moreno shares from his home in Portland (in the time since Ohms, he relocated from Bend, the artsy Oregon enclave which proved to be too small and understimulating for his racing mind). “Coming out of the pandemic, I still felt isolated and depressed, you know?”

For nearly 35 years, Chino Moreno always felt like more. And then he decided he’d had enough.

WORDS by IAN COHEN
PICTURES by BRANDON BOWEN

This is the cover story of the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. You can subscribe to get 4 print issues of the mag each year here.