Despite how unlikely it may have seemed decades ago, when they were best known for their singer jumping on Korn’s Ice Cube cover and their own Top 40 hit about shoving things, Deftones are now among the most respected and influential bands of the 1990s. When they debuted with Adrenaline in 1995, they weren’t even the best rock band with an awkward rapper in the city of Sacramento; they were, like so many young men of their time, joined on stage and in the studio by a DJ.

Now, Hayley Williams is joining the band on stage to sing “Minerva”; we’re a full decade past the days of Deafheaven and Nothing using their tricks on black metal and shoegaze; the nation’s indie venues are lousy with bands playing drop-D punisher riffs while hoodied frontmen whisper about violent sex. Venture onto Reddit and find it clogged with people arguing about whether Deftones are nu-metal or shoegaze and the sociological implications of how you personally answer that question. Last summer, they mounted a nationwide arena tour despite their last album coming out before the Covid vaccines. The Los Angeles Times, reviewing the first of two sold-out shows in Inglewood, called them “Gen Z’s favorite heavy rock band.” The oldest members of Gen Z are two years younger than Adrenaline.

Deftones’ dramatic shift in reputation from nu-metal B-listers to avant-rock heroes has less to do with their artistic growth (considerable though it may be) than it does with the evolution of how people who like to think about rock music feel about heaviness, romance, the primacy of our emotional life, and having a body generally. You can theorize about that change if you want, but these are the conditions in which private music, the first Deftones album since 2020’s excellent Ohms, exists. Green Day and the Foo Fighters might play to bigger crowds, Korn and System of a Down might have a greater nostalgic pull. But to find another artist from the 1990s whose influence has only grown and is still making records at a high level, you probably have to start thinking about Deftones as being in a category with Radiohead (who haven’t made a record in a decade) and Björk (who, despite her continued popularity, is not doing multiple nights at the Forum). They are, against all odds, elite.

How did they get here, to arguably the height of their popularity, 25 years after the release of their best-selling album? private music—like A Moon Shaped Pool and Fossora—is unlikely to draw in unconvinced listeners, but like those records, it shows them fully in control of their instantly recognizable sound, able to effortlessly bend it around whatever structures they put in its place. Following an interlude that sounds like Tim Hecker sighing through a hurdy-gurdy, “cXz” has the kind of dreamy chorus that singer Chino Moreno can by now probably write in his literal dreams. Rather than let it soar cloudward on a thick rocket of sound, though, the band rattles into a momentum-shifting staccato led by drummer Abe Cunningham. It’s a subtle little thing, but the tension makes the song feel itchy and impatient without sacrificing its beauty. The discomfiting comfort in Deftones’ music often comes from its treatment of heaviness and prettiness—a great Deftones song can feel like an arduous hike to a stunning vista that reveals a violent storm on the horizon—but this pull in the song’s textures makes it feel like it’s urging you away from the payoff it promised to give you.

While much has been made of the supposed war of taste between Moreno (the heartthrob and aesthete! He loves Pantha du Prince and Tortoise!) and guitarist Stephen Carpenter (the metalhead! He wears cargo shorts in videos and seems like he’d rather be in Fear Factory!), they’re both equally comfortable working anywhere between the two poles of their sound. Carpenter plays a riff in “locked club” that wants to grunt and groove, but it sounds like Carpenter is lightly flicking the string with his thumb, so that the riff feels both heavy and soft simultaneously. And Moreno is also more aggressive and pissy than he has been in decades, sounding at times like Joe Casey from Protomartyr or Kendrick Lamar doing his “squabble up” wise-guy sneer. In “cut hands,” an honest-to-god rap-metal song and honest-to-god highlight, he’s swaggering around, commanding, a tetchy lounge singer jabbing his martini glass at the audience, taunting.

Like every Deftones record since their ludicrously expensive, self-titled album in 2003, private music sounds incredible, done up like the 4K sexy violence of a John Wick film. The gloss of the production allows the lean “milk of the madonna” to slide past with a luxurious efficiency, while it gives a sheen of heavenly valediction to the chorus of “infinite source” that amplifies the sense of benevolent finality at the song’s center. Frank Delgado—the onetime DJ who now plays a role like Mission of Burma’s Martin Swope, manipulating noise and painting chilly watercolors in the background of most of these songs—processes Carpenter’s guitar to sound like a purring rotary phone dial in “departing the body,” the album’s swaying closer. While Carpenter has made no secret of his love for Meshuggah, the sparkling detail of private music, the loving way the album lingers on thick, sustained chords for a beat longer than seems natural, like it’s trying to tear itself away from a Rothko, means part of the album’s pleasure comes from his pure devotion to tone, Sunn O))) with certified-platinum pop instincts.

Finding new ways of playing heavy music softly, transforming depression into beautiful aggression—these are fresh iterations of the odd inversions at the center of Deftones’ artistic success. It can still be difficult to determine where they belong, and thus how to understand them: Are they the blushing romantics of the Family Values Tour? Are they humble heirs to the emotional grunge-gaze of Swervedriver and Hum with a few misguided raps buried in the back catalogue? What are you supposed to think about this music? A nu-metal band writing about darkness as a source of triumph is no more unique than—or all that different from—a shoegaze band locating the signal of angelic harmony in the midst of abyssal noise. Still, something unique happens when all of these sources of heaviness—musical and emotional—are plugged in and allowed to feed back into one another. What is it? Deftones have been trying to solve this riddle for thirty years, since the very first song on their very first album. They’ve never sounded more at ease with not knowing the answer.