This feature is from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE. You can subscribe to get 4 print issues of the mag each year here.
There’s a platonic ideal of a certain kind of social media comment that reads:
“This song reminds me of the Summer after we finished highschool, driving in my buddies truck, windows down, blasting this out, just living in the moment. We had our whole lives ahead of us. I’m pushing 30 now and hate my life. Divorced, dead end job, but sometimes I’ll listen to this song and remember how good we had it. I wish I could go back”
It’s so ubiquitous that my friends and I have developed our own post-pub game in which we challenge each other to find a song on YouTube that doesn’t have this kind of comment beneath it, so that we can add it to things like “Ride of the Valkyries.” A while back, I thought I’d bore everyone with a zine, collecting examples of this kind of accidental everyman poetry. But I never did, so when we were plotting out this special issue of Vice, I thought I’d gather up the most heart-wrenching ones inspired by Deftones.
After all, when a band has existed for 35 years, you’d think a certain amount of nostalgia-posting would be inevitable.
But the posts I found had other ideas. Even when there were traces of regret, it wasn’t quite all-consuming enough. In fact, a lot of them were pretty fucking rosy.
While there were of course the performative, de rigueur tales of angst and woe you’d expect from metalheads with no one else to share their memories with but the internet
…there were also heartwarming tales of personal growth.
It was only when the algorithm sent me on a detour through the video oeuvres of Spineshank and Dog Fashion Disco that I realized what was weird about the posts: unlike nearly all of the groups they first broke through with, Deftones STILL have teenagers in the comment section. In fact, it was nearly a 50-50 split. No wonder I was having a hard time sniffing out that potent tang of regret that comes from being a late-capitalist millennial serf who owns nothing but a lightning cable laptop and a trove of fading youthful memories.
What’s even rarer about Chino and the boys is that the intergenerational fandom they inspire seems totally unironic, unique for a band that everyone thought had apexed in popularity the year Ice Spice was born.
How the fuck have Deftones endured? How have they thrived while their former peers command nothing but ridicule? Why are Generations Z and Alpha still getting the words “When you’re ripe / You’ll bleed out of control” tattooed on their bodies?
It must be a glitch, right? A cultural spasm, a hypnic jerk in the simulation, like how Pitbull can still find enough fans in Temu bald caps to fill entire arenas in 2025, or the internet choosing as its first superstar an aesthetically ostracized Lancastrian choir boy and his omniscient and eternal “Rickroll.” How have Deftones floated through the last three and a half decades of accelerating human turmoil and trouser innovations without their cool points washing off?
NEOPUNK FM, the pubescent cultural arbiters who can never quite decide if they’re trying to troll you, speculate that Deftones’ undying popularity is tied to the “goth girl supremacy” of kids’ cartoons from the 2010s, which featured female characters who dress in an alternative fashion and thus created what they call a “Gen-Z-Cartoon-to-Deftones-Enjoyer Pipeline.”
And now, those cartoon-watching kids have grown up, and they’re all trying to have sex with each other.
So much so that their collective ardor has spawned a whole new genre of internet person: The “Deftones Girl” or “Deftones gf,” an archetype downstream from the regrettably monikered “big tiddy goth gf” whose number are busy becoming influencers, e-girls, strippers, and OnlyFans models.
Is it the fug of sexuality that keeps the band evergreen? The lustful harmonics on tracks like “You’ve Seen the Butcher” or “Lhabia” have made Deftones the unwitting heralds of Baddiecore, the latest taxonomy for “sexy” metal. The allure of Chino’s breathing difficulties and come-hither vocals always seem to get a shout out in the comments.
Even though it’s been decades since anyone could call Deftones “nu-metal” and come out with their credibility intact, it also has to be said that they are objectively the least embarrassing pup of that particular litter. To be honest, this hasn’t exactly been difficult; the band just looked like rockstar versions of the mates you went skating with and managed not to dress like complete fucking tits, something that eluded the Mudvaynes, Coal Chambers, Mortiises, and (hed) PEs of this world. Their considered and sometimes clinical aesthetic, delivered by designers like Frank Maddocks, was able to reach out and draw in sections of society far beyond the strange coalition of frat pigs, Magic: The Gathering fans, and juggalos that routinely claimed nu-metal as their own. Unlike other rap-rock outfits of the time, Chino’s lyrics read like poetry. There probably aren’t many Gen Alpha teens getting the words: “I come into your house / Make love to your spouse / Fuck her in the mouth / Then I’m out / What?” inked on their bodies for eternity.
Even when Chino’s lyrics are basically illegible, they’re still somehow kicking down cultural boundaries.
What’s obvious from these comments is that Deftones fans are not just intergenerational but multicultural as well, reflecting a band that is composed mostly of non-white members. While it’s not exactly a revelation that heavy music has a rich history of being created and enjoyed by humans who would have trouble passing as a Norse church burner, it’s also not as if you’d find many metal bands on Dr. Umar’s iPod shuffle (this is purely presumption on my part: apologies to Dr. Umar if you’re slamming it to Cradle of Filth on the reg).
Albeit for some this was a poisoned chalice:
Is this broad appeal a driver of Deftones’ durability or a symptom of it? Could it be the band’s rigorous devotion to aesthetic liminality that has kept them spry and beguiling?
Has their compositional wherewithal engineered this epoch of cultural endurance? Do Stephen Carpenter’s licks elevate the band beyond your common or garden nu-metal wastrels? Is Chino just stupidly hot? Maybe the answer to these questions is a whole load of both’s and more beyond that. Maybe the secret to Deftones’ abiding allure is that like some kind of magical mirror, you can see in them whatever you want to see. To some, they are a misery destroyer, a life-affirming route out of the mundane to an ecstatic reality deluxe.
While to others, they just make great music to kill to.
Truly, something for everyone.
This feature is from the fall 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE BE QUIET AND DRIVE ISSUE. You can subscribe to get 4 print issues of the mag each year here.
The post The Heart-Breaking Accidental Poetry of Deftones Fan YouTube Comments appeared first on VICE.
