In anticipation of Deftones’ first new album in roughly half a decade (Private Music drops this Friday), this week we’ll be spotlighting some choice material from the band’s esteemed 30-year career. Just re-reading that, it’s hard to believe it’s been literally three decades since the band first burst onto the scene with their 1995 debut Adrenaline, which, along with Korn’s self-titled debut a year prior, represented a profound sea-change in the world of heavy music at the time. And while their aggressively explosive west coast-flavored brand of alternative-metal would spawn a sea of imitators (good and bad…but admittedly mostly bad) in subsequent years, it’s easy to forget just how fresh, raw, and visceral that sound felt back in the mid-90s before it was commercially exploited towards the end of the decade.
Case in point, check out this characteristically unhinged set live from The Abyss in Houston circa 1996, in which frontman Chino Moreno spends a good portion of the show stage-diving and crowd-surfing. The band rightfully sets things off around the 1:40 mark with “Root” and the intensity doesn’t let up for the entire duration of this absolutely killer set. Turn it up and witness the Deftones at the height of their youthfully aggressive exuberance, in all its manic glory:
