I was doomscrolling the other day and a post stuck with me. It sported an article clipped from a magazine. It read “baby born from embryo frozen in 1994, the oldest baby ever”. Someone retweeted the article: “that baby could have been playing tony hawk pro skater 2 and listened to killswitch engage, now he’ll play fortnite and listen to carti”.
I don’t know if it’s just me and my algorithm, but sometimes it feels like the world ended in the early 2010s. This is a silly example of that doomsday feeling, but it’s telling. Many of us remember life back then like this blissful American suburbia of the soul – Myspace, nu metal, Mountain Dew and all – and now it’s no more. It wasn’t really like that, but now it feels as if it were. And we’re left here replaying those muted memories, gurgling through way-too-hi-fi speakers.
I bring this up because this nostalgia colours the new Deftones record, Private Music. As I listened to it, it felt the way that content makes me feel.
It makes sense, of course: Deftones has always been protagonists to that sort of early 21st century nostalgia. Elite members of the nu metal class, they have always been the good shit you remember your older brother blasting through your bedroom walls – especially if it never happened. Deftones is the kind of mallcore you still enjoy with no shame now that you pay your own bills.
But what I did not see coming was just how much Private Music would have felt like an echo of the gilded days. It feels like a fuzzed-out memory of the band itself, a machine built exclusively of salvaged remains.
In simpler terms, on Private Music Deftones sounds just like Deftones, but with something off about them: even compared to their most ethereal numbers, Private Music is blown all the way out. Everything echoes or is covered in fuzz. It sounds like the slowed-and-reverbed version of themselves. In a word, a memory.
Take, for example, ‘infinite source’. It’s quintessential Deftones: huge riffs, booming drums and the saccharine vocals that soar over the mayhem. Easily one of the best tunes they’ve dished out in a while, in a record chockful of the best Deftones in a while. And yet the overall sound comes off as dissociated, like an out of body experience. It has a nocturnal quality that makes it sound more like a recollection rather than an actual song that just came out.
The same goes for ‘milk of madonna’, ‘locked club’ or ‘cut hands’. ‘~metal dream’ and ‘cXz’ even sound like a desperate dub version of a cut straight out of Around the Fur. Most songs come off like Deftones summoning themselves, distant and dusty.
But the most surreal are the slower numbers: ‘I think you all the time’, ‘departing the body’ and ‘the droning souvenir’. Here the band stretches their sound so much that it becomes something rather akin to the nu-shoegaze acts like Wisp – this evanescent disembodied wall-of-sound that’s distinctly Deftones but also not really. A perfect picture smudged by all the years gone by.
So, is it a bad record? Quite the contrary, I’d say. But it’s uncanny. There’s something vampiric about Private Music. It’s the sound of something irreparably lost and grieved.
