This story is taken from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. We’ve sold out our copies, the only ones left are in stores—perhaps there’s one near you? Secure yourself the next 4 issues by subscribing.
Eternal Suburban Teenagers
As long as there are suburbs, there will be teenagers who hate living in them. Nobody understands them and nobody ever will, apart from Deftones, whose music is eternally teenage because it is sad, angry, and horny all at the same time. Until they ride out of town in a fast car with their crush in the passenger seat and the local bully’s head mounted on the grille, they will pass the time loitering in parks; booting up the PS5 at whoever’s parents are away; engaging in pyromania; and, when they’re old enough, getting sold oregano instead of weed by evil bigger boys from the next town over. They might vape now as opposed to necking an entire flagon of cider and being sick down themselves like they did in the 2000s, but the ‘burbs never fails to produce a new generation of teens ready to take up the mantle of dangling their legs over the local vert ramp wearing an American Idiot hoodie and some Converse they’ve scribbled dicks all over.
E-Girls
Deftones intersects with the meme economy on multiple fronts, from the opening drum hits of “My Own Summer (Shove It)” being used as the soundtrack to some sort of slapstick accident (e.g. someone getting hit in the face with the microwave door), to their reputation as a “sex band” beloved by horny dudes and hot girls alike. The latter demographic includes thousands of e-girls streaming ASMR ‘live reactions’ to their biggest hits on Twitch, laying “Sextape” over Instagram posts of their leg bruises, and calling people “foidcels” on X. As I wrote in the last issue, “Their role in society is to make men horny and irritated at the same time,” which coincidentally is when men most want to listen to Deftones, making e-girls’ relationship with the band symbiotic, like mongooses eating parasites off of a warthog’s back.
GLOBAL War ON TERROR Veterans
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were fought by a particular breed of American soldier. In the wake of 9/11, a significant portion of new recruits were between the ages of 18 and 21, and they took youth culture’s cocktail of glorified ultraviolence, Jackass buffoonery, and sexed-up pop culture with them into combat. Half of them went from playing Metal Gear Solid 2 in bed to ripping through Fallujah listening to “Chop Suey” in the space of two months. Tragically, this demographic also suffered the highest casualty rates in both of these dubious conflicts, but there are plenty who made it home and can now be spotted knocking about in hardware stores wearing camo jorts and sunglasses on the back of their heads, or jacking it in the parking lot to the kind of high definition pornography no one does better than the States. God bless America!
Strippers
The relationship between Deftones and strip clubs is extremely creatively bountiful. Occasionally described as “stripper metal,” the band has songs both inspired by strippers (“Korea”) and seemingly designed for strippers to pay down their mortgage to (all of them). Allegedly, the working titles of the demos for their ‘lost’ album Eros were named after strippers—“Dallas,” “Destiny,” “Melanie,” etc. Strippers, in turn, love Deftones. Source: me, you, and every sex worker on Instagram.
Drainers
Drainers have a finger in every subcultural pie going. The same way Drain Gang makes a strange, digitally native potpourri of rap, pop, hyperpop, R&B, and metal, their fans pinch bits and pieces from all over the place like sartorial magpies. If Deftones has become a subculture unto themselves at this point, beloved by an impossible-to-categorize array of people that somehow includes paid killers, Time Team fans, Trippie Redd, and Adam Sandler, there’s no reason Drainers wouldn’t wiggle their fingerless gloves to tap in as well. There’s a modestly popular TikTok of a teenager clutching some CDs in his bedroom, overlaid with text that says “shoegaze deftones fight club donnie darko radiohead taxi driver american psycho drain gang breaking bad yeah i play guitar,” which frankly does the same job as this entire issue in way fewer words.
Elder Greebos
Typically found roaming the streets in lonely bands of one or hanging out in small groups at board game cafés, the elder greebo is a powerful specimen. They enjoy zip-up hoodies, TV shows where people dig stuff out of the ground, drinking artisanal beer in camping chairs at metal festivals, not knowing their own strength, and the films of Rob Zombie. They love Deftones but hate it when their music is called “sexy” because it “trivializes the craft.” On a similar note, casually mention a metalcore or emo band around them at your peril, because they will follow you around scoffing “Really, really? What about Fleshgod Apocalypse???” for the next 45 minutes until they run out of puff or blood sugar and have to take a sit down.
Fashion Gays
Deftones has a good aesthetic, ergo, they have discerning gay fans. The amount of moaning Chino Moreno does—combined with the fact that he’s had many different hairstyle eras—already placed Deftones squarely in cunt-serving territory, even before the 2023 campaign for the Heavn x Deftones capsule collection featuring Tara Reid cemented it forever. Have you noticed the uptick in fashion stories in this issue? Let’s just say it wasn’t hard finding the staff.
Blog-Era Millennials
No one claims Deftones harder than someone who grew up stuffing a pin-badge-covered pencil case into their Jansport while the new video for “Back to School (Mini Maggit)” blared out of MTV. Their early teen years are immortalized in 4×7 glossy prints taken on family holidays by relatives who snapped them sulking at a theme park in a pair of Berny’s and a graphic T-shirt that says something like “EVIL INSIDE” in the Intel font. Now, they all work in digital marketing and social strategy and deploy those on Instagram Stories with an ironic caption ahead of every Live Nation Presents [Insert Warped Tour/Ozzfest Band Here] gig they paid $200 to be in a good row for because fuck standing for three hours. They used to wear knock-off Slipknot hoodies but now they mostly wear Carhartt and have beef with a particular Pitchfork review from 13 years ago that still keeps them up at night.
Petrolheads
This guy loves three things: cars, America, and “the Deftones.” His first exposure to them came through hearing “Tempest” on the Furious 7 soundtrack and now he likes to listen to it doing 100mph down the freeway in a classic car or Dodge Challenger, the strap of his wrap-around sunglasses whipping in the wind. His “Hey, I’m just asking questions” politics have made him a staple character at his favorite dive bar, where locals know all his lore and he is personally responsible for putting at least nine people off ever coming back.
American Pie-Era Frat BROS
The commercial dominance of pop punk and nu-metal around the turn of the century briefly collapsed some of the cultural barriers between popular and unpopular crowds in educational facilities. Football players were wearing wallet chains, taking up skateboarding, and shouting along to “Last Resort” along with the skinny freaks and that one girl who pretended to be a cat. Formerly the keg-sucking, money-having useful idiots of college parties soundtracked by Sugar Ray, Xzibit, Limp Bizkit, and Third Eye Blind, they are now most frequently spotted talking about TRT at NFL games, or driving a Tesla Model X blaring a Spotify playlist called “Greek Lyf 4 Lyf” and singing the riff to “My Own Summer (Shove It)” when it inevitably comes on—“baw na-na-na-naw, baw na-na-na-nawwwww.”
Ukrainian Goths
Contrary to popular belief, war doesn’t put an immediate stop to daily life. There are teenagers in Ukraine, there are goths in Ukraine, therefore there are teenage goths smoking weed and getting off with each other in town squares, on playground climbing frames, and at warehouse shows as they would anywhere else in the world. [See the cover story of VICE Magazine, v29n1: The Rock Bottom Issue.] The main difference is they pair corpse paint with Adidas tracksuit bottoms and have grounds to interpret “Rats!Rats!Rats!” as being about the Russian armed forces.
Normie Influencers
earThrowing up the peace sign for a GRWM video in an Around The Fur T-shirt, a balayage, and some Vans classics, probably in a pastel colorway, this breed of influencer deftly betrays two previously warring subcultural factions at once. With a working knowledge of nu-metal gleaned from growing up a “mosher” yet the same “Sundays with this one” sensibilities you see on people with gray plush living rooms, they have workshopped what is essentially an alternative ‘clean girl’ aesthetic. Ceramic boob plant pots, millennial pink books, and a framed reissue of Significant Other on vinyl populate their otherwise minimal living spaces, but behind the scenes there is a very expensive inbred dog and a Peloton subscription.
Chicanos
Everyone loves Deftones. There are even more micro-subcultures than we have space to name in this already sizable list. However, not a single one of them has a stronger claim to this band than a Latina woman with a neck tattoo.
This story is taken from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE, a Deftones special. We’ve sold out our copies, the only ones left are in stores—perhaps there’s one near you? Secure yourself the next 4 issues by subscribing.
The post Which One Are You? Here’s Every Type of Deftones Fan appeared first on VICE.
