On a warm August afternoon inside Atomic Records, a no-frills music store tucked in a Burbank, Calif., shopping strip, the five members of Deftones carried armloads of vinyl to the register.
Abe Cunningham, the drummer, rifled through a thick stack: the Residents, Prince, the Pretenders. Frank Delgado, who plays keyboards and turntables, walked out with Kraftwerk’s “Neon Lights” and an album from Alice Coltrane. The frontman Chino Moreno picked up a record he’d never heard of, drawn to a fierce-looking Roman soldier on the sleeve, and rattled off some of his favorites from different eras: Danzig’s self-titled debut, Morrissey’s “Viva Hate,” anything Cocteau Twins.
The picks might have seemed surprising for a band considered the vanguard of the late-90s nu metal movement. But Deftones’ eclectic tastes have proven to be the key to the band’s longevity. Where peers like Limp Bizkit and Mudvayne hewed to chunky metal, syncopated rhythms and rap-rock fusion, Deftones pursued elements of shoegaze, post-punk and new wave, underpinned with an instinct for pulsing alternative metal.
“We’ve always tried to stray away from boxing ourselves into any one certain sound,” Moreno, 52, said. “We made music for us, based on all the influences we like. And those influences really vary.”
The path has been anything but easy. Addiction, writer’s block, the death of a band member — “every cliché you can imagine,” Moreno said in an interview at the record store last week, sitting with his bandmates atop wooden record crates in between the aisles of old vinyl.
But the group has stuck it out, and is thriving. On Friday, Deftones will release their 10th album, “Private Music,” filled with shimmering melodies, glitchy synths and Moreno’s soaring vocals interspersed with Stephen Carpenter’s muscular, down-tuned guitar riffs.
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