On Wednesday night, Gen Z’s favorite heavy rock band took a moment onstage at the Kia Forum to remember their first gig there.
“Our first time at the Forum was 1995, opening for Ozzy Osbourne,” Deftones singer Chino Moreno said, sweating through his T-shirt before the first of two sold-out crowds. “It was f— crazy.”
Since the early ’90s, Deftones — the Sacramento-raised, metal-tinged experimentalists — have defined the bleeding edge of heavy guitar rock, working in elements of post-punk, shoegaze, electronics and melancholy whispered vocals. They’ve had six top 10 albums in four different decades, founded a hugely popular festival (Dia De Los Deftones, in San Diego) and cultivated one of the most devoted, multicultural and open-minded subcultures in rock.
But something happened over the last five years where the band’s precise lane of ambient sadness and tensile rage hit a whole new generation right where it hurts. To judge by the Forum crowd on Wednesday, Deftones have never been bigger, or more definitional for what young people want out of heavy music in all its gradients. A band ahead of their time, for 30 years and counting.
Deftones’ last album, 2020’s “Ohms,” was a return to the more brutal form of their breakthrough late ’90s and early 2000s LPs, despite the band (now Moreno, guitarist Stephen Carpenter, drummer Abe Cunningham and keyboardist Frank Delgado) recording at the peak of pandemic lockdowns.
At the time, Moreno’s assessment of the album matched the mood of the era — “The record has a dystopian vibe that, in hindsight, really feels current to me,” Moreno told The Times. “It just kind of happened how that’s the current state of a lot of people’s lives now — uncertainty about their surroundings and not feeling super optimistic.”
Well, we’re all right back in it.
If anything’s changed since, it’s that younger audiences — entranced by the shoegaze atmospheres on singles like “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away) and the ’90s metal aesthetics of their retro merch — have brought fresh perspective onto why Deftones remain so captivating and cathartic. Their plays are into the billions on Spotify, and “Cherry Waves” became a TikTok hit for documenting the murk of young lust — something is clicking anew.
After an opening set teasing hypnotic new music from Latin-infused heavy rockers the Mars Volta (who know a thing or two about responding to oppressive environments), Deftones rose to the occasion of fresh stardom. Wednesday’s Forum show felt locked into the full scale of an arena tour, with beautifully-framed abstract visuals that positioned the group on two stories of risers, leaving Moreno plenty of room to bloodlet up front on the churning “My Own Summer” (Shove It),” while commanding the void in silhouette on “Sextape.”
With a fresh wave of interest and a vast catalog to pull from, the band’s range and sequencing for the show were exceptional. They’ve always moved between gloss and grime, shimmer and savagery. But following them from the misty, Cocteau Twins-indebted early single “Digital Bath” to the contemporary, bone-cracking crunch of 2020’s “Genesis” made the old stuff feel visionary and new material ageless. Mid-career tracks like “Prayers/Triangles” showed the melodic panache that’s helped these albums stand the test of time, while era-defining cuts like “Change (In the House of Flies)” haven’t lost of drop of menace — if anything, they’ve gained power with time.
The band didn’t pander to the newbie meme crowds though. In this political environment, it takes some guts to wrap up with “7 Words,” their famously anti-cop grinder from 1995, where a very young Moreno taunted “Resist to cease, understand? / God hates black shades and all the clergy / Mr. P.I.G., could I f— see?” In 2025, he played it with reverence for the purity of that rage, the absolute conviction that the world he saw was broken. It’s worth rediscovering that feeling today.
