private music

PRIVATE MUSIC: DEFTONES SHARPEN THE BLADE ON THEIR MOST DISCIPLINED RECORD IN FIFTEEN YEARS

private music by Deftones — the Sacramento alternative metal band’s tenth studio album — arrives August 22, 2025, via Reprise/Warner Records as their most critically acclaimed release since Koi No Yokan.
The band’s first studio album since 2020’s Ohms, private music marks the longest release gap between two Deftones albums.
Five years of patience, it turns out, bought them something:
at Metacritic, the album holds an average score of 90 based on fourteen reviews, indicating “universal acclaim.”
That number is not decoration — it reflects a record that arrives with structural clarity, deliberate pacing, and a band in full command of a genre they helped invent.

Texture and Architecture: How Nick Raskulinecz Rebuilds the Deftones Engine

The album was produced by Nick Raskulinecz, who previously worked on the band’s albums Diamond Eyes (2010) and Koi No Yokan (2012).
That lineage matters enormously. Raskulinecz is not a neutral party — he is the engineer of Deftones’ most compositionally focused output, a producer whose signature involves preserving live-room energy while applying meticulous tonal control in post. On private music, that approach reaches something close to its logical endpoint.

The album was written and recorded over two and a half years in Nashville, Joshua Tree, and Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu.
Those three rooms pull in different directions — Nashville’s dry, close-miked precision; the desert’s ambient bleed; Malibu’s open-room resonance — and the collision is audible across the record’s eleven tracks. The guitars on opener “my mind is a mountain” carry the kind of high-frequency sibilance and controlled saturation that suggests parallel compression on the bus: the peaks are capped, the transients still crack, but the whole picture is wide and pressurized.
Chino Moreno’s voice hangs like mist over Stephen Carpenter’s churning chords and clean riffs before Abe Cunningham detonates a pre-chorus with a splash so thunderous it feels like a storm breaking.

Clocking in at just under 43 minutes across 11 tracks, the album strikes a compelling balance between brevity and depth.

With only two tracks exceeding the five-minute mark — “souvenir” and “departing the body” — most songs fall comfortably in the 3–4 minute range, maintaining a dynamic pacing throughout.
That discipline is structural, not incidental. The record builds in the way a well-sequenced set of movements does: short, intense cells followed by longer, more atmospheric exhales.

“infinite source” demonstrates the band’s shoegaze fluency most explicitly —
“infinite source” is a standout shoegaze dream, built on an infectious riff and closing with layers of Chino’s vocals stacked with precision.
Frank Delgado’s keyboards and sampler work thread throughout the midrange, occupying the frequency band that, in a lesser arrangement, would be contested by rhythm guitar. Here, they coexist because Raskulinecz has evidently managed the tonal center with care, giving each element its vertical real estate. The result is a record that sounds dense on first pass and reveals layering on headphones — a quality with real catalog longevity, and a direct contrast to the flatter production choices on, say, Korn’s Requiem (2022), which lacked this kind of midrange dimensionality.

Even compared to the band’s most ethereal numbers, private music is blown all the way out — everything echoes or is covered in fuzz, sounding like the slowed-and-reverbed version of themselves.
Whether that registers as a design choice or a production overcorrection depends on your tolerance for density. Most of the record earns it. Occasionally it costs something in transient definition, particularly on the busier passages of “cut hands,” where the low-mid accumulation slightly dulls Cunningham’s kick attack.

Words, Weight, and the Interior Life of Chino Moreno

All lyrics are written by Chino Moreno; all music is composed by Abe Cunningham, Moreno, Frank Delgado, Fred Sablan, and Stephen Carpenter.
The division of labor matters: the band builds the architecture, Moreno furnishes it. On private music, his concerns are less external than on any prior Deftones record — there are no clear narrative protagonists, no confessional relationship mechanics of the kind that drove mid-career Deftones tracks. Instead, the writing occupies a register closer to meditation than confession.

Meditating on the beauty and peril of nature, the challenge of cultivating a positive mindset, and visions of a journey beyond the physical realm, private music showcases Deftones at their most evolved.
Moreno’s vocal choices throughout the album function less like conventional melodic leads and more like timbral instruments in a mixed ensemble. On “i think about you all the time,” the upper register sits unusually high in the mix — unguarded, without the distorted guitar cushion that typically holds Deftones vocals in place — and the exposure amplifies the song’s Sehnsucht considerably.

“I think about you all the time” came out of a quiet moment Moreno had on the beach near Shangri-La: “I remember getting up in the morning, walking down the street, jumping in the ocean, coming back in my swim trunks and sitting there in my bare feet with the guitar and just start playing.”
That origin is audible. The song’s chord movement has the unresolved quality of something composed without editing instinct — a suspended figure that circles rather than resolves, landing on a mixolydian-adjacent tonal center that keeps the ear slightly off-balance throughout.

DIY noted that “metal dream” “embodies the ebb and flow most, taking the frontman back to the verge of nu metal rap with remarkable precision, far from cliché or pastiche, and paired with an ever-mesmerising chorus.”
That observation correctly identifies what makes the track work: Moreno deploys the rhythmic vocal delivery not as nostalgia but as contrast, the cadence snapping against the cleaner, more diffuse texture of Delgado’s layered samples. The chorus then opens into the kind of fifth-relation harmonic shift that Deftones have been engineering since White Pony — unexpected, almost physical, and impossible to anticipate on first listen.

The record’s closing track, “departing the body,” allows Moreno the most unadorned vocal space on the album. At nearly six minutes, it earns its length through harmonic patience — the band withholds the dynamic peak until the final ninety seconds, and Moreno’s delivery stays measured throughout, never pitching into the kind of cathartic release that lesser arrangements would demand too early.