Deftones Get Justice, Bring Sold-Out Crowd to Bridgestone

After 37 years as a band, Deftones are finally ready for their close-up. Or rather, the world is finally ready for Deftones.

The Sacramento alt-metal kings were ready in 2022, when they last rocked Nashville at Municipal Auditorium. They were ready when they packed the Ryman in 2016. They’d been ready for two decades when they played Marathon Music Works, whose capacity is 1,500, in 2013. There were literally 10 times that amount of people filling a sold-out Bridgestone Arena Wednesday night, where the band stopped on their first hard-ticket headlining arena tour. It came a mere 30 years after releasing their debut Adrenalin, and five years following their ninth and latest studio LP, the COVID-era Ohms. 

This rock band rose to the forefront of cultural relevance and hit peak popularity nearly four decades into a career that’s withstood tragic deaths, divorces, drug addiction and the rest of it. And they did it in 2025, a time when guitars are nearly nonexistent on mainstream radio. It’s an unprecedented feat. How did this happen?

Singer Chino Moreno hasn’t had an answer for that question in recent press, and he didn’t offer one during the show, which was light on stage banter. Still, perhaps no band on earth should be happier that the recent TikTok ban didn’t take hold in January. Over the past three years, Deftones inexplicably reached a new fan base of zoomers and younger millennials on the social media app that’s been make-or-break for so many new artists on the rise in the 2020s — by way of songs like 2006’s “Cherry Waves” and 2010’s “Sextape.” Both are dreamy ballads from overlooked wilderness-era albums; they took more than a decade to finally connect. 

The former didn’t even make it on the set list Wednesday, while the latter inspired a galaxy of cellphone flashlights — a “Free Bird” moment rivaled only by a later performance of the band’s biggest career hit, the ethereal space jam “Change (In the House of Flies).” That song appeared on 2000’s White Pony, which originally earned them the “Radiohead of heavy metal” tag they’ve effortlessly lived up to ever since.

One of the major takeaways from the 2020s Deftones resurgence is that it isn’t image-driven; it isn’t nostalgia-driven, either. The kids came for the music alone — music that, though old to their parents, is new to them. It’s music that’s gone on to meme status as music to fuck to, par for the course for the only alt-metal band to ever ooze suave sex appeal. 

But while timeless tunes and achieving fuck-rock status might be what resonates after so many years, maintaining a lineup of mostly founding members with nonreceding hairlines — along with a singer who retains his voice — doesn’t hurt either. Along with Moreno (who, at 51, is a dead-ringer for himself 25 years ago), drummer Abe Cunningham, guitarist Stephen Carpenter and keyboardist-turntablist Frank Delgado were looking fresh themselves, and sounding even better. 

Moreno hardly broke a sweat hitting the high notes on a one-two White Pony punch of “Feiticeira” and “Digital Bath,” despite spending the better part of 90 minutes jumping off risers and running between wings of the stage. His screams were as punishing and furious as ever on the band’s riff-heavy, metal-tinged rippers like “Rocket Skates” and “Around the Fur.” They held the crowd’s attention with a Vise Grip from the opening strains of “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away),” and showed no signs of fatigue by time the show closed with the ever-relevant Adrenalin anti-police-brutality anthem “7 Words.” The band unleashed those tunes with the energy of the kids packing the house to hear them.

Among the Nashvillians gathered to celebrate the band at Bridgestone was Paramore’s Haley Williams, who, needing no introduction, danced onto the stage unannounced during the encore to duet with Moreno on the 2004 shoegaze banger “Minerva.” Williams brought the entire crowd onstage with her (in spirit) when, midsong, she dropped to her knees at Moreno’s feet for an extended “we’re not worthy” bow.

The Deftones worship got underway three hours earlier. Boston nu-gaze quintet Fleshwater — a band deserving of a better name — kicked the night off, looking unintimidated by the size of the room as they jumped around and rocked out as if playing a beer-fueled basement show.

“Thank you for being here early,” one of the band’s guitarists told the fast-filling arena, where the relatively unknown band had a circle pit going mere minutes into their set. This was a good sign of things to come. Fleshwater sounds more than a little like Deftones, which is to say they sound a lot like beloved alt-space-metal cult legends Hum (themselves among Deftones’ most obvious influences). This is not a bad thing.

Unlike Wu-Tang, the bill’s better-known opener — notoriously self-indulgent psych-prog stalwarts The Mars Volta — is not for the children. The kids (and their parents) in the now-full Enormodome grew increasingly restless as the band performed a turgid 45-minute set of unreleased material from a forthcoming album (due April 11) like the crowd wasn’t even there. 

In fact, were it not for the barely visible silhouettes of Volta founders Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s and Omar Rodriguez-López’s trademark afros, it was hard to tell if the real band was even there on the blacked- and blued-out stage. Anyway, the band’s new music (not unlike their old music) sounded like cable-company hold music in the mellow moments, and like Alvin and the Chipmunks having an argument with Geddy Lee on a roller-coaster in a haunted house in the bombastic, frenetic moments. A recently announced string of forthcoming Deftones dates includes IDLES on the undercard. In a world going mad, the idea of a British punk ranting about Labour Party politics for an arena of unexacting zoomers makes more sense than this. But props to The Mars Volta for having the guts to undertake this experiment.

Nevertheless, the set didn’t stop the show from being an inspiring spectacle to behold. In an age when Cheeto Jesus Trump gets a second chance to watch the world burn, there is at least some small sense of triumph and justice in seeing a band get the love they should’ve gotten in the Clinton era. Deftones weren’t the biggest band of their heyday, but they should’ve been. By the looks on the fresh faces of kids leaving their first concert — maybe to start their first band — Deftones’ real heyday is right now.

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Nashville Music News | Nashville Scene

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