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 are some who’ll tell you there’s no such thing as chance. Yet maybe when you’ve spent 25 years making things together, you can win serendipity to your side.
A moment of telepathy arrived in the creation of Deftones’ new album private music, when Frank Maddocks—the band’s long-time designer-collaborator—turned his attention to photographer Kenneth Cappello and his albino California kingsnake.
“I wanted to do something really impactful, striking, high contrast, memorable, free of any Photoshop trickery, or typography,” Maddocks states. “Just a purely strong, iconic image.”
So it was that the serpent became the album’s unlikely cover star. Remarkably, and totally unbeknownst to Maddocks, Deftones frontman Chino Moreno had already written a song for private music called “ecdysis”—the process in which reptiles shed old skin.
“Chino sent me the track list and I’m like, ‘How would I have ever known that?’” Maddocks laughs. “The synergy is fucking amazing…. It’s not just that it’s the Year of the Snake, or that it’s a great image. Chino was actually talking about that, too. It’s another instance where happenstance has made us connect.”
Deftones’ relationship with Maddocks began at a time when they were seeking redefinition, as the world shrugged off the skin of the 20th century. 2000’s White Pony was the album that reshaped the way the band sounded and Maddocks made sure it also changed the way they looked and that people felt about them. Then a young designer finding his feet at Warner Records, for Maddocks it was both a dream gig and a trial by fire.
Stripped of the try-hard distressed aesthetics and corny embellishments of their contemporaries, White Pony arrived with a minimalism that was stark and striking and sexy, and which mirrored their pivot into intimate new sonic territory.
“It didn’t have the fucking name on the cover,” Maddocks enthuses. “It was solid silver with a little horse. Even then, we were challenging people. They’ve always just marched to their own beat and done what they wanted to do, so it’s been nice to be able to be a part of that ride.”
Its success emboldened Maddocks to push the envelope on Deftones’ following self-titled LP.
“I can tell you that it scared people at the label,” he laughs, recalling initial reactions to the skull emblem that adorns the album’s cover. “We’re coming off this very clean aesthetic and very palatable design… and I’m like, ‘Hey, the band loves this [skull].’ And they’re like, ‘Oh shit.’ But that’s what you have to do to people. You have to keep challenging them to come around.”
“It didn’t have the fucking name on the cover. It was solid silver with a little horse.”
Following a clear missive from the band, that sense of experimentation carried through to the seedy visuals of Saturday Night Wrist, taken directly from the 1970s B-movie Roxanna.
“They sent me the DVD and said, ‘Do something like this,’” Maddocks recalls. He had heard basically nothing of the music while developing the artwork, a process that has remained the norm. His work nevertheless captured the woozy, uneasy tone of the album: “That one in particular really feels like the music,” he says, adding later of the artwork for 2016’s Gore: “One thing I’ve always tried to play with is a push and pull between beauty and grit, soft and hard.”
By this point, Maddocks has been in it for the long run. It hasn’t always been plain sailing. Ten years on from White Pony, he was busy making another white animal famous as a Deftones cover star, this time the barn owl shot by photographer John Ross that graces Diamond Eyes. “That album was the first after Chi [Cheng, Deftones’ original bass player] unfortunately passed,” he adds. “People see it like a phoenix rising from the ashes—this triumphant life force. Was that in my head going into it? Not really. But is it something that’s probably there, or why it resonated with the guys? Definitely.”
Today, the real-world impact of Maddocks’ work lives around us in the culture. Whether it’s a White Pony silhouette tattooed on someone’s body, or a pair of diamond eyes scrawled onto the side of a high-school toilet cubicle. Before the release of 2012’s Koi No Yokan, Deftones came to Maddocks with a Polaroid taken by the artist Futura. It depicts a glass bridge at the Opposite House Hotel in Beijing and since the album’s release, has inspired scores of fans to enact a pilgrimage of sorts to recreate the image themselves. Whether private music inspires a wave of people to go out and buy albino California kingsnakes remains to be seen.
Follow Paul Weedon on X: @paulweeedon
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 Designer Frank Maddocks Draws a Portal into Deftones’ Hidden World appeared first on VICE.
