Deftones started the way a lot of the best bands do, a few high-school mates messing around with instruments. Guitarist Stephen Carpenter, singer Chino Moreno and drummer Abe Cunningham came up together through the Sacramento skateboarding scene and formed the band in 1988, with bassist Chi Cheng joining a couple of years later to lock in the lineup that would define their sound.
They arrived in the nineties lumped in with the nu-metal wave, but it never really fit. Where their peers went for blunt aggression, Deftones built something stranger and more beautiful, Carpenter's crushing down-tuned riffs underneath Chino's voice as it swung from a scream to a whisper and back. Add Frank Delgado's atmospheric turntables and samples and you get a band that critics ended up calling "the Radiohead of metal," which tells you how far outside the box they were.
The run of records speaks for itself. Adrenaline (1995) and Around the Fur (1997) built the fanbase the hard way, through relentless touring, and tracks like "My Own Summer (Shove It)" put them on the map. Then came White Pony in 2000, the album most fans point to as their masterpiece, home to "Change (In the House of Flies)" and "Digital Bath," and the record that won them a Grammy for the track "Elite." Diamond Eyes, Koi No Yokan, Gore and Ohms kept the standard sky-high.
Their story carries real weight too. The loss of Chi Cheng, who died in 2013 after years recovering from a 2008 car accident, hit the band and their fans hard, and the way Deftones carried on without ever betraying what they'd built says a lot about who they are. That mix of heaviness and vulnerability is exactly why people connect with them so deeply.
Our Deftones t-shirts are officially licensed and printed on quality cotton, with designs drawn from classic album artwork and band imagery. Whether White Pony soundtracked your teenage years or you found them yesterday, browse the full Deftones range at Teerex and wear one of the most original bands heavy music has ever produced.
