Deftones

Since 1988 · United States

Deftones formed in Sacramento in 1988 around Chino Moreno, Stephen Carpenter and Abe Cunningham, soon joined by Chi Cheng on bass and later by Frank Delgado on keyboards and turntables. Their story

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Who they shaped

Behind them, left to right: Radiohead, The Human League, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Portishead, Depeche Mode, My Bloody Valentine, Hum, The Cure, The Smiths.

In front, left to right: beabadoobee, Fontaines D.C., Tame Impala.

The bigger the face, the stronger the proof: they said it themselvesreporteda critic, or widely accepted

Start here

White Pony (2000)

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White Pony is where Deftones stopped sounding like a metal band and started sounding like nobody else: Stephen Carpenter's riffs still crush, but they sit inside a haze of reverb, programmed beats and Chino Moreno's half-whispered, half-screamed vocals. "Change (In the House of Flies)" is the heart of it, a slow, swaying song that builds and builds without ever exploding the way the genre expected. Moreno played the producer Loveless while they were making it and told him that was the sound he wanted. It became the bridge between heavy music and shoegaze that a whole later generation crossed.

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Deftones

White Pony · 2000

Deftones formed in Sacramento in 1988 around Chino Moreno, Stephen Carpenter and Abe Cunningham, soon joined by Chi Cheng on bass and later by Frank Delgado on keyboards and turntables. They came up in the late-90s alternative metal boom, but Moreno's own taste ran to the Smiths, the Cure and Depeche Mode, and the band's sound kept bending toward atmosphere and melody.

White Pony (2000) made the turn plain: a heavy record built on My Bloody Valentine's walls of guitar and the beats of trip-hop, and everything since has kept that balance of crush and haze. Chi Cheng was badly injured in a car crash in 2008 and died in 2013; the band carried on, and a younger generation of shoegaze and heavy-rock bands has grown up on them.