It has taken five years for new Deftones music, the longest gap between studio albums for the Sacramento, California-based alternative metal icons, but now they return with the outstandingly atmospheric offering Private Music.
However, things have changed during that period since the release of Ohms, with Private Music being the first recording since the departure of bassist Sergio Vega, with the basslines of touring member Fred Sablan appearing on an album for the first time.
As 2020 release Ohms saw the band welcome back famed producer Terry Date for their first collaboration in seventeen years, their latest offering continues the trend and finds the band reuniting with producer Nick Raskulinecz, with him having previously worked on the band’s 2010 album Diamond Eyes and 2012’s Koi No Yokan.
The album begins brutally through My Mind is a Mountain which provides an immediate assault of heavy, down-tuned guitar riffs and explosive drums from Abe Cunningham. Frontman Chino Moreno snarls, “We’ve been waiting here patiently, locked in this state, clocking our time”. Locked Club then offers sludge-sounding guitar riffs, this time combined with more melodic vocals from Moreno, before Ecdysis opens with a more electronic, synth-inspired feel, being driven along by a pounding, but never invasive, bass line. The song also provides poetic lyricism, like “Rivers rising, swollen streams dividing.”
An early highlight on the record is Infinite Source, which offers high-pitched riffing from guitarist Stephen Carpenter being paired with contemplative lyrics, such as “The love we chased, and found”, which are earnestly delivered by Moreno.
The expansive, epic Souvenir is the longest track on the record, clocking in at just over six minutes long, but it by no means drags and slows the blistering pace that has been built up on the album through the frantic previous four songs. Then, the ferocious cZx gives way to the most mellow moment on the record, I Think About You All The Time. The delicate love song pulls on the heartstrings, contemplating “All of our days”, and proclaiming, “we’ll never change.”
Compelling riffs return to the fore through the unmistakenly Deftones song Milk of the Madonna, with the pacey riffing continuing on Cut Hands, which also offers a confrontational feel to the vocals. The frenetic energy remains through penultimate track Metal Dream, a song that looks to the future with lines such as, “In your dreams, all we see, Are the gold-drenched days laid ahead”, with the rumours swirling it took Moreno a year to work the lyrics for the music being found to be believable through the depth of such lines.
The closing track Departing the Body showcases a theatrically arranged production, further demonstrating the skilful work of Raskulinecz throughout the album. Moreno expresses, “Surprise, surprise, we made it” before proclaiming “We’re finally through” as the album is brought to a simmering yet melancholic finale.
Ten albums in and thirty years from the release of their first, you could forgive a band for becoming stale, yet there is no evidence of that here. Private Music displays a band operating at the top of their genre, and with the feeling that there is far more to come. Their latest offering simply sets down a gauntlet for their peers, and for themselves, to keep the consistent quality going.
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