private music — Deftones | Album Review
August 30, 2025
Thirty years in, Deftones trades catharsis for reflection and emerges with a body of work that feels less like a statement and like a séance — deliberately elusive, and deeply felt.
Deftones — private music (2025, Reprise) · 8/10
For fans of the band, there’s a certain unspoken weight that hangs over any Deftones release. It’s not just the magnitude of their legacy — now thirty years deep into a genre-defying career — but the haunting expectation that whatever music they create next will attempt to fracture that legacy and yet, somehow expand it as well. Their tenth studio release private music does more than just meet expectations. It provides a fresh perspective on what a Deftones album can be.
By no means is this record a reinvention in the way White Pony flipped Nu-Metal on its head at the turn of the millennium, nor does it feature the signature post-hardcore grandeur of Diamond Eyes. Instead, private music operates in a more liminal space — slow, saturated, and curiously noncommittal. The album’s ethos is both present and elusive, much like a memory you know exists but can’t entirely place. While that may sound like a frustrating experience for the listener, it actually results in the album feeling more Deftones than anything they’ve put out in the last decade.
There’s been plenty of commentary surrounding the record’s introverted production — helmed by Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan producer Nick Raskulinecz, with mixing support from Rich Costey — but the main shift here is actually spiritual rather than technical. In the band’s Apple Music interview with Zane Lowe, singer Chino Moreno poignantly revealed that recovery and sobriety have brought a clarity to his creative process.
“I felt like I woke up,” said Moreno, describing how emerging from the pandemic haze has made being present not just a habit but a mode of being. “I just feel more present and I feel more inside the music. I’m not dulling it… I can’t really explain what it is, but it’s awesome.”
Moreno spoke of songwriting not as a linear, chord-to-chord exercise, but as an atmospheric excavation, stating “we’re much more into making sound than we are writing songs.” It’s in that space — in sober stillness, in sound before structure — that the album really finds its heartbeat. The title private music is more than a phrase; it’s a mission statement. This is Deftones’ most insular release to date, trading a long-standing interest in catharsis for a fascination with reflection.
Where Ohms opened with the explosive preamble “Genesis,” private music begins with “my mind is a mountain,” a track that doesn’t so much announce itself as drift into frame. It’s a low-pressure system of a song — humid, dense, and strangely serene. Stephen Carpenter’s single-minded riffs hum like they’re breathing through the floorboards. Moreno’s vocals barely register as words at first, sounding more incantation than lyric. Rather than completely kicking the door open, Deftones emerge with the lights off. It’s an opener that sends a clear signal: you’re not here to be blown away, you’re here to be submerged. The band’s long flirtation with shoegaze and dream pop — heard on tracks like “Sextape” or “Entombed” — is no longer a piece of the puzzle. It’s the record’s entire skeleton.
For a band known for duality — serenity and violence, sensuality and rage — private music introduces a third axis: distance. There’s an appetite for climax, but it often evaporates before it lands. “ecdysis,” one of the album’s most hypnotic moments, constructs itself around an arpeggiated motif and distant echoes of Moreno’s voice. Just when you think it’s gearing up for release, it refracts inward instead. It’s infuriating, then luminous, then both.
Chino’s lyrics here are their most elusive, with intimacy rendering itself in shadows, barely palpable. Such opaque lines might feel evasive in lesser hands, but Moreno bears the rare ability to summon tangibility out of suggestion. The words on paper may be vague, but their delivery — half breath, half echo — makes you sense more than you hear. It’s almost closer to evocation than songwriting.
Stephen Carpenter’s contributions here are also a clear point of transformation. Unlike his usual 8-string assault on recent works, his riffs on this album show a rare amount of restraint. On “locked club,” there’s a groove that wants to grunt and grind, but it’s delivered with a fingertip — giving the riff a soft yet seismic impact. On “infinite source” his guitar features a ghostly tone in the mix, relying more on presence than force. Even on the album’s closer “departing the body,” the guitars shimmer with a weighted ambience, providing the record with a satisfying final exhale.
The clear line of demarcation for private music is its devotion to feeling over form. Tracks don’t follow any kind of traditional arc — they coil and dissolve. Songs like “souvenir” might float past you on loops and tape echo, calling to mind where the band was for 2012’s Koi No Yokan. “cXz” feels like a disorienting dream caught in motion, while “milk of the madonna” churns with spiritual static, existential and intense. Even “i think about you all the time” refuses a smooth emotional landing. It hovers for half its runtime like an unresolved memory, then smothers you all at once with perpetual grief.
Clocking in under 45 minutes, the album doesn’t overstay its welcome — although some moments (“ecdysis,” “souvenir,” “i think about you all the time”) share such tonal cohesion that they blur together. However, this opacity feels intentional.
Deftones are at a place in their career where they no longer have to prove anything, and they act like it on private music. Although it’s received critical acclaim thus far, it’s not a people-pleaser in the conventional sense. It doesn’t chase trends, nor does it aim to impress fans of the “old stuff.” It’s not an experiment so much as a meditation. In a cultural moment obsessed with immediacy and impact, this album feels like a refusal to perform.
Make no mistake, that refusal is powerful. With a discography spanning from the chaotic intensity of Around the Fur to the spacious melancholy of Koi No Yokan, private music feels like a culmination — the sound of a band no longer orbiting its extremes, but settling into its own center. It may be the record that splits die-hards, but private music isn’t concerned with consensus. It’s music for shadows, for empty rooms, for closing your eyes in the passenger seat.
It’s private, and that’s the point.
FAV TRACKS: “ecdysis,” “infinite source,” “cut hands”
LEAST FAV: “cXz”