DAY ONE

Robertsons Fishing Tackle in Dagenham, East London is a vast establishment. A maze of hooks and chairs and various little sections presumably dedicated to more niche aspects of the hobby. I have no fucking clue what anything is, but I’m here for one reason only.

“Hi, I spoke to you on the phone?” I say to the guy behind the counter. “I’m here for the pink maggots.”

I only need one, to raise as one would a child, but he shunts about 70 my way. Apparently it’s not possible to buy single-digit quantities of maggots. “Could they escape?” I ask. This makes a Robertsons regular wearing a Gucci sidebag laugh. I ask a lot of questions, but the important facts are these: there are two types of maggots—actual “pinkies” (greenbottle larvae) and maggots that have been dyed pink. The more I take, the better my chances are of producing a fly. I don’t need to feed them. 

I emerge from Robertsons with a green tackle box containing a mix of both types of pink maggot, squirming around in a load of sawdust to “stop them smelling.”

Back home, I separate four (two of each variety) into individual containers. The pinkies are named Howard and Gary, the dyed maggots Robbie and Mark. The main one is obviously Robbie. The 60 left in the tackle box are dubbed “the hive,” which I scrawl on a label.

I leave my children to settle in.

DAY TWO

I’m drawn to Howard. To the untrained eye he is dead, but when I give his pot a shake he springs into action, writhing around before burrowing away again. He looks cozy. If he were a human, he would be tucked beneath a blanket burning a candle with an autumn-themed scent. 

Checking on the hive is my least favorite task. The maggots make the sawdust undulate and looking at it too long makes you feel like you’re tripping. It’s also hard to gauge what the atmosphere is. Is there a sense of freedom in the air? Or have I callously separated them from their maggot brothers over at Robertsons? The hive is the perfect microcosm of society. Some will take things in their stride. Others will go to therapy in their twenties.

In classic performing monkey style, Robbie comes alive as soon as I move his pot. He can’t help but entertain.

Mark has something stuck to his arse. He seems embarrassed and wriggles away as quickly as he can.

Gary’s still hanging in there. Shame. 

DAY THREE

I wake myself up at 2AM audibly groaning. I’d been having a nightmare about the maggots doubling in size and becoming quite menacing. Before bed I’d asked a man on Instagram who’s into fishing for advice, and he told me a story about a maggot factory near him that stinks due to the rotting cow flesh they feed them. I begin to regret this whole thing, by which I mean my life.

DAY FOUR

There’s a good vibe in the hive today. If it were a club, I’d walk in and be like, “Okay, this is cool.” I’d stay for at least three drinks. It’s nice to see some actual pinkies still knocking about, too. They’re considerably smaller than the dyed maggots and the obvious underdogs, but it’s very “one love” in the hive.

Over in his pot on the kitchen counter (where else would you keep them?), Robbie stirs.

“Before bed I’d asked a man on Instagram who’s into fishing for advice, and he told me a story about a maggot factory near him that stinks due to the rotting cow flesh they feed them”

DAY six 

We’ve hit a critical point. Either all my maggots are dead, or they’ve entered the chrysalis stage. They’re no longer pink and wriggly, but still and brown. I call up Robertsons. The man that answers asks if I’m the one feeding them to spiders. “No, I’m the one that’s raising them,” I reply.

He confirms what I fear: flies are on the horizon. I must get rid of the hive. I feel bad that I didn’t spend more time with Robbie when he stirred yesterday. He clearly must have known. 

DAY seven

I dump the hive in a bin in Hackney Wick. It might constitute bioterrorism, but that’s not my problem. 

DAY eight

Howard lies awake, his eyes boring into the dark (of his chrysalis). He knows the hive is gone. ‘Why have I been chosen to stay?’ he thinks. ‘Am I next?’

DAY ELEVEN

There hasn’t been much activity the last few days. Without thinking, I go into the kitchen, pick up Gary’s pot, and give it a shake. It is second nature, like when a mother involuntarily produces breast milk when a baby looks in her direction.

“I dump the hive in a bin in Hackney Wick. It might constitute bioterrorism, but that’s not my problem”

DAY THIRTEEN

Oh my fucking God. 

There, in Howard and Gary’s tubs, are fat bluebottle flies. They’re surprisingly still, adjusting to the addition of six legs. Howard callously steps over his chrysalis as he limps around his tub, desperate to get out. Gary’s always rubbing his hands together, like he’s up to something. I must release them. There’s so much rotten food and dog shit out there calling their name.

I imagine myself opening their lids and one of them will land on my arm, like a bird, wanting to snuggle into my bosom one last time. I open their lids and they just fly off.

DAY FOURTEEN

Mark is fucking huge. ‘Now this is a fly,’ I think to myself. If someone were to draw a fly from memory, they would draw Mark. 

I free him without much ceremony then rush back inside. Robbie is hatching. 

It’s nauseating. Robbie uses this horrific semi-translucent sac to push his way out. There’s a lot of flailing. He finally emerges, but something is wrong. He’s still very maggot-like, like he might be undercooked. I desperately give the pot a few shakes. He lays motionless on his back. I fear that Robbie has died.

DAY FIFTEEN

Robbie lives! He is a fly! However, his back legs are lame. They drag behind him, slightly mangled. There’s a bit of matter from his chrysalis that he’s failed to get rid of stuck to one of them. I contemplate intervening with tweezers, then remember that he’s a fly. “Survival of the fittest,” my flatmate reminds me.

I take Robbie outside and gently shake him from his pot. He drags himself around in the rain, unable to fly. “I think he’ll die soon,” my flatmate says. The mood is somber.

Suddenly, Robbie takes off. He soars high into the sky until he becomes but a speck in the distance. ‘Goodbye,’ I think. Then I realize he’s getting closer. I can see his translucent wings fluttering. His red eyes come into focus. We are face to face. “Thank you,” he whispers. We linger for a moment like this, before he takes to the skies once again.

“Amber?”

I jolt back to reality. 

“What are you thinking about?” my flatmate asks.

“Oh, nothing,” I reply. I turn my attention back to the ground. There’s Robbie, still lumbering along. 

Robbie ‘The Maggot’ Maggit passed away, Saturday, September 6, 2025. He was born a maggot but died a fly, fulfilling his destiny, and achieving the ultimate honor of his people.

Follow Amber on Instagram: @amberawlings

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 In Honor of Deftones, I Raised My Very Own Pet Pink Maggits appeared first on VICE.

“Twenty tongues / Moving at once…”

What the hell? He pressed repeat and listened again. Daniel had heard the new Deftones song enough times by now that he could sing along. He tapped his computer awake and opened a Word document titled “Gore Portal (working).” A short story he’d been writing, inspired by the band. He wasn’t 100 percent on the title yet, so had made note of other possibilities. Alternatives included: “Twenty Tongues.” He’d written that months ago. There were other lyrics in this new song that seemed to reference his story, too. And other words he couldn’t quite make out, not yet anyway. Sure, some were sort of abstract, could be interpreted differently, maybe. But “twenty tongues”? That was pretty damn specific.

“High marks… / ‘Cos you made it, Count…”

“Of a membrane, peeling… / Straightforwardly…”

Daniel’s story was about an obsessed Deftones fan getting drawn into a… cult? The cult was called ‘Gore Portal,’ though he hadn’t actually decided yet whether he was going to use the word ‘cult’ in the finished thing. He also wasn’t sure whether ‘Gore Portal’ should be the name of the cult, the name of one of the cult’s rituals, a sacred place, some divine entity, or any/all of the above. Anyway, in the story this fan-protagonist starts to think he’s hearing coded messages in Deftones’ lyrics. The lyrics, as he interprets them, allude to Gore Portal, their beliefs, their practices and promises, and the means they use to recruit. The fan comes to understand through the music that new initiates, before they even know they are initiates, are visited by a sequence of arcane seductions. A figure called ‘The Count’ acts as a kind of messenger. The name of the first ritual? Twenty tongues.

Daniel closed the Word document and opened MSN Messenger. He needed to talk to someone. He saw Jack had changed his username to… ‘The Count.’ What the hell? The Count was busy, apparently. Daniel sent Jack a text message, ordering him to get his ass online. About ten seconds later the little dot icon by Jack’s username went from red to green.

“Weird stuff’s happening today. Why are you called Count??”

“That’s the name of my cat dude. She’s Countess.”

Daniel remembered now, Countess the cat. Maybe that’s where he got the name for the story in the first place. Jack typed out a string of punctuation that meant ‘pussy.’ Daniel typed an eye-roll back. 

“What?? Cats are very sensual creatures. And so am I…” Wink.

“Jack, did you hear the new Deftones?”

Jack’s dot turned red: The Count is Away. Fuck’s sake. Jack was so… distractible. Daniel leant back on his tatty office chair and sighed. His bedroom was covered in picture cuttings, collaged together and stuck directly to the wall with glue. He’d fixate on a specific image, scouring magazines, old books, newspapers or whatever, and cut them out over and over. He’d started arranging them by type, so that each image-form proliferated over time, growing like mold across the walls. A hundred crescent moons, for example, created a dark and glittering firmament over the bedroom door. Elsewhere, he’d gotten preoccupied with reptile anatomy and built a mound of rheumy eyes and plasma-slicked eggs in the corner of the room opposite his computer (on top of the mound he’d erected a scaffold out of snake bones, stacking ribcages upright on top of one another in a charnel tower).

“Your bones broke / Then we made a tower…”

Daniel looked at MSN again: Jack’s dot had turned back to green.

“Still working on your deftones shrine?” asked Jack/The Count. It was always so humid in the summer. The heat made the glues seep, like the room was breathing.

“I haven’t got band pictures up, give me a break… It’s like an artwork. Or mood board or something…” That was true. No pictures of the band. Pictures for the band. Jack hadn’t been in Daniel’s room for a while, and it was different now, but you could call it a shrine, he guessed. The area around the bed looked sort of shrine-like. Above the headboard he’d stuck red, pink, and green flowers, aglaonemas and chrysanthemums mainly, mixed with plastic gore from back issues of Movieworld.

In Daniel’s story, the final ritual has the fan-initiate make a bizarre shrine out of papier-mâché and floristry foam. The construction incorporates spidery stilt legs, a seating platform, a backboard panel just above the seat, and a little Perspex window embedded in the pulp. The window is decorated with fan-made cum, produced each morning by the seated initiate. Pink and green chrysanthemum stems are stuck into the shrine’s surface; these are also replenished daily. Special care is taken around the Perspex window to create a subtle pink/green illumination. This routine eventually culminates in the initiate shooting themselves, adding to the composition.

“You’ll find your true reflection in the splatter…”

“Have you ever had a prostate exam?” asked Jack/The Count. Wink.

“No,” lied Daniel. He remembered the nurse spoke so softly. She told him to get on the bed, pulled on a glove and rubbed lube over her fingers, using her other hand to spread his cheeks apart slightly. She kept talking to him the whole time, softly softly, pushing her fingers inside him mid-sentence. He made a sound of involuntary excitement the nurse either didn’t hear, or just ignored.

The main riff drops out and a filter turns everything to metallic clatter and ice. The drums were recorded in a morgue, apparently. In Daniel’s story, Gore Portal have a whole procession of nurses finger-fucking the initiate, and he describes the ceremonial aspects of their costumes, including capes, cuffs, pleated face masks made out of latex and straw, and rubber gloves going up to their biceps. Before each round of administrations, the nurse puts their hand into the initiate’s pocket and pulls out a surgical tool.

“Because you brought your own… instruments”

He pressed repeat. Listen again.

“So you know I’m writing this Deftones story?”

“Yeah, I read some of this… Gore Portal?”

Jack/The Count’s dot turned green to red. The Count was Busy. Now The Count was… Away. Busy, Away, Busy, Away.

“Fuck’s sake!” typed Daniel, to no one. The Count’s status icon alternated red and yellow, red and yellow like traffic lights, and then: green. The Count’s dot turned green. The Count was — available.

“I’m available, Daniel,” said The Count. Daniel was starting to understand what The Count really was, and wasn’t: “I know.” The Count asks Daniel if he’s ready.

“Ready for what?”

“A sticky bloom, above your head,” said The Count.

Daniel looked at the chrysanthemum and aglaonema blooms above his headboard. He unwrapped the gun he’d hidden under the bed, and started squeezing his cock through his jeans. The Count’s status flicked faster and faster: Busy, Away, Busy, Away, Busy… Away. 

“Ready?” asked The Count.

In Daniel’s story, fan-Daniel imagines a gradual papier-mâché encasement, seated astride spider legs, oasis residue sprinkled on his face. The Perspex window illuminated just so by fresh flowers. The chrysanthemums had been replaced daily, up until now.

Daniel was ready. Daniel was… Ready. Daniel was Busy… Daniel was Away.

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 Gore Portal appeared first on VICE.

Deftones are loved because of the ancient curse which dictates that every teenager must be sad, angry, and horny, both constantly and all at the same time. Their music meets the needs of this type of person perfectly, and after more than 30 years as a band, the formula is only getting more potent: The theory has now been proven true for four different generations of teens.

As such, many people—from keg-sucking Gen X bookworms allowing themselves a rare moment of sincerity before the Soviet bombs drop to today’s Twitch stream psychos stick and poking each other for playground clout—have decided to get a Deftones-related tattoo upon their skin. While fans of lesser bands are forced to make do with lyrics and album titles (boring), Deftones have something way more magical up their sleeve: For 30 years, the White Pony silhouette has been out there moving through the distressing noise and darkness of the world, guiding people towards each other, a conversation-starting emblem that has surely sparked tens of thousands of marriages, lifelong friendships, enmities, fuck parties, and whatever else humans get up to.

In the summer of 2025, VICE went to the band’s big outdoor mega concert in Crystal Palace, South London to meet those people and ask them about the pictures on their bodies. 

Danielle, 39 & Grace, 31

D: I was at this house party. A band was playing in the conservatory and people were crowd surfing, it was insanely sweaty.
G: I was walking through to the kitchen to get some cans, and Danielle was like, “Is that the White Pony tattoo?!”
D: We realized we had the same White Pony tattoo in exactly the same place. We stayed up till the sun rose talking about Shrek, became inseparable immediately, and went to Las Vegas. The rest is history. 

Jade, 20

“I didn’t really like school, everyone classified me as ‘the emo girl.’ I wanted this tattoo for years and got it as soon as I turned 18. I just love the music so much. I wanted to show that on my body. Chino’s voice…”

DREAMY!

Mo, 39

M: “I got the tattoo a week ago. I’m a tattoo artist and I had a cancellation in the morning, so I thought I’d just tattoo myself. There’s an outsider element to Deftones. It wasn’t the cool thing to listen to where I grew up, in Glasgow. But still, you feel something in it.”

VICE: Do you feel there’s any significance to it being a white pony?
M: I’m not sure. Doesn’t it mean cocaine or something?

Joe, 29

“I once had to rent a pig for a photo shoot to promote Busted’s reunion tour. Years before that, I’d heard their singer Charlie Simpson talking about how much he loved White Pony on the radio. I ran into him shortly after I got this tattoo. I had a few pints and went over and said, ‘I once had to book a pig for you and you got me into my favorite album ever,’ and showed him my arm. He said it was the best opener to a conversation he’d ever heard!”

Will, 19

VICE: So what got you into Deftones, Will?
W: The Matrix!

Jess, 18

J: I got mine for my 18th birthday!

Scully AKA ‘Ciaran,’ 25 

“When people see my tattoo they’ll try to start up a conversation. It’s usually in a pub smoking area and they’re just happy to speak about Deftones for like 15 minutes. If you like Deftones, you really, really like Deftones, you know? I can’t think of any other band that makes you feel like you’re levitating.”

ZAC, 29

Why do people love Deftones so much?

“ASMR-coded perverts, I reckon!”

Follow Ashton Hertz and Jak Hutchcraft on Instagram

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 Everybody’s Got a Deftones Tattoo These Days appeared first on VICE.

“She wasn’t a whore at all,” a disembodied female narrator insists over footage of someone pulling on over-the-elbow leather gloves. “She liked fun, she liked excitement. Is there anything wrong with that?” These are the opening seconds of Roxanna—a 70s porno about a young blonde whose out-of-control libido plunges her into despair, insanity, and loneliness over 51 minutes of trashy, mostly-lesbian softcore with an acid-washed soundtrack. A freeze frame of her face, thrown back in ecstasy, would end up becoming the cover of Deftones’ Saturday Night Wrist.

Described by Chino Moreno as an album of “straight evil music,” Saturday Night Wrist was written when tensions between the band were at an all-time high, and the excesses of sex, drugs, and booze that fueled previous albums were wreaking havoc on their personal lives. It’s a bleak body of work that fires indiscriminately at everything around it. While it may begin with a pint-launching guitar riff and a “Woo!”, the first words Moreno utters on opener “Hole in the Earth” are a curdled, desperate plea: “Can you explain to me how / You’re so evil, how?” 

The album mulls this question as Moreno plunges himself into despair, insanity, and loneliness over 56 minutes of mostly miserable songs with a sinister erotic charge. Sex is conflated with sickness on “Pink Cellphone,” an injured woman wearily “haunts the roads” on “Riviere,” and “Drive”, a cover of The Cars, also works in a sample of Massive Attack’s “Protection”—a story about the impulse to shelter a wayward girl from harm, until the line between concern and possession begins to blur (“Who’s gonna drive you home… tonight?”). On “Beware,” Moreno moans over jackhammer guitars while repeatedly asking if “you like the way the water tastes.”

These tracks were almost certainly influenced by the ongoing dissolution of Moreno’s marriage, but crucially the emotions that come through in the abstract—obsession, danger, abjection—are the same ones that sit at the darker end of sexual experience. The uneasy thrust of songs like “Beware” almost veers into the gothic horror terrain of Ethel Cain, which perhaps helps explain Deftones’ venerated status among e-girls. Basically, loads of it is about women in a way that completely transcends gender because the songs are often written from the female point of view, and the lyrics are so cryptic you can never be certain what they mean anyway. The artwork was pulled together by designer Frank Maddocks, but its contents do coincidentally mirror-flip Roxanna, with psychodrama at the front and sex as subtext. Like, what if a B movie adult actress was also the frontman and primary lyricist of an alt-metal band?

Deftones’ reputation as a “sex band” has been around almost as long as they have. Granted, they’re not as on the nose with it as some of their “horny metal” peers—like Nine Inch Nails, whose breakout single had Trent Reznor threatening to “fuck you like an animal,” or Type-O Negative, whose 6’8 viking of a frontman, Peter Steele, appeared in Playgirl clutching a bouquet of pink flowers in one hand and his rock hard boner in the other—and the singles that first made Deftones massive, “My Own Summer (Shove It)” and “Back To School (Mini Maggit),” lumped them in with late 90s/early 2000s wallet-chain rebellion more than anything else. But you don’t have to dip your toe far below the surface to feel the erotic undercurrent.

“What if a B movie adult actress was also the frontman and primary lyricist of an alt-metal band?”

A lot of it is in the storytelling: a woman kidnapping a guy on “Feiticeira”; half-remembered fragments of “floating underwear” and “hours of pleasure” on “Sextape”; the Ed Kemper-style fantasy of electrocuting a girl to death and then re-dressing her on “Digital Bath.” But, even without all that, there’s something about the atmosphere of their music that has made it the primo ‘fingering at a house party’ soundtrack for four decades, and prompted sexual awakenings across three generations and counting.

For millennial goths, that awakening was likely delivered by Queen of the Damned, the 2002 vampire film in which Aaliyah has violent sex in a bathtub filled with rose petals to “Change (In the House of Flies).” For Gen Z, it straddles two separate trends—shoegaze and male-moaning ASMR—that have permeated social media since 2020. (In 2023, someone posted a long X thread where they went through every Deftones album in order, leaving annotated timestamps of when Moreno does his finest whimpering.) Gen X skaters and metalheads would, of course, have been dry humping to “Mascara” at Ozzfest long before that.

Yet while Deftones often reference sex and drugs, they’re hardly “a sex, drugs, and rock and roll” band. With the notable exception of “MX,” which Moreno opens by groaning about “your pussy and your bones,” their handling of sex is more subtle and cerebral than Mötley Crüe banging on about “Girls, Girls, Girls” or Lil Jon compelling the club to “Bend over to the front / Touch the toes!” Deftones have the effect of making you feel a certain way without really knowing why. The lyrics are all suggestion, and the rest is pure vibe. The phrase “around the fur,” for instance, is supposedly about the dark underbelly of the beauty industry. But it also makes you think, invariably, about pubic hair. The cover of the album does much the same.

“There’s something about the atmosphere of their music that has… prompted sexual awakenings across three generations and counting”

That’s what Deftones are best at. They place an image in your head, and leave you to do the rest. That cocktail of indirect references and gentle provocation accounts for their erotic pull across basically every demographic, from hot girl TikTok influencers to Iraq war veterans. One of the earliest architects of Deftones’ ascent was Madonna. She was passed their two-track demo by a friend of a friend of the band when she co-ran her newly minted entertainment company Maverick, which had already established itself as a purveyor of “risky business.” (Their first two releases were Sex, Madonna’s 1992 coffee table book of explicit self-portraits, and its accompanying studio album Erotica—both works of sexual taboo equally lauded and slammed by critics for their “audacity.”) She prompted the call that got Deftones signed for their first five albums, then gifted them an autographed, semi-naked poster of herself.

Obviously, you could also throw all this out of the window and simply say their music “fucks,” which it does. It boils with rage but blisters with tenderness at the same time, owing to the fact that they write monolithic metal guided by the yearning hands of trip-hop, shoegaze, and Sade. The result is a sound that feels like two people fucking in a burning building at the end of the world. There’s suffering there if you want it, pure animalism there if you want it, and male sensitivity there if you want it. A real gooner’s buffet. Moreno’s lyrics, though rarely fun, are predominantly made up of fantasies and fleeting impulses. They find a kind of excitement, evil or otherwise, everywhere from the strip club to the passenger seat. And as the faceless narrator wondered of Roxanna, “Is there anything wrong with that?”

Emma Garland is the author of Gabrielle, a newsletter about sex culture and desire. Follow her on Instagram: @emmaggarland

This essay 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 Deftones: Anatomy of a Sex Band appeared first on VICE.

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.

The gear is a collaboration with Goal Projects. Proceeds from the sales will go back into the team. Notably, the band pointed out that the team is from the Oak Park neighborhood. This is where the Deftones got their start, more than 35 years ago. Check out the gear below:

The band also pointed out that “sales of the collection” will not just go to support the team’s gear. “Every order helps keep soccer free for the kids and supports programs that help them on and off the field,” they stated.

Among the merchandise available to buy are two jerseys and a Deftones-branded soccer ball. As of this writing, the soccer ball is sold out. It will, however, “become part of the kids’ official kits in the new year.” So, they’ve obviously made sure to set some aside.

Deftones 2026 Winter tour dates:

1/29 Paris, FR, Adidas Arena
1/30 Bruxelles, BE, Forest National
2/1 Hamburg, DE, Barclays Arena
2/3 Munich, DE, Zenith
2/5 Lodz, PL, Atlas Arena
2/6 Berlin, DE, Max-Schmeling-Halle
2/7 Dortmund, DE, Westfalenhalle 1
2/9 Stuttgart, DE, Hanns-Martin-Schleyer-Halle
2/10 Amsterdam, NL, AFAS Live
2/12 Birmingham, U.K., BP Pulse Live
2/13 Glasgow, U.K., OVO Hydro
2/14 Manchester, U.K., Co-op Live
2/16 Dublin, IE, 3Arena
2/18 Cardiff, U.K., Utilita Arena Cardiff
2/20 London, U.K., The O2

Deftones 2026 Spring tour dates:

3/13 Santiago, CL, Lollapalooza Chile 2026
3/15 San Isidro, AR, Lollapalooza Argentina 2026
3/17 Luque, PY, Asunciónico 2026
3/20 Sao Paulo, BR, Lollapalooza Brasil 2026
3/22 Bogotá, CO, Estereo Picnic 2026
3/27 Monterrey, MX, Tecate Pal Norte 2026
3/29 Mexico City, MX, Palacio de los Deportes
5/2 Sydney, AU, Qudos Bank Arena
5/3 Sydney, AU, Qudos Bank Arena
5/6 Brisbane, AU, Brisbane Entertainment Centre
5/7 Brisbane, AU, Brisbane Entertainment Centre
5/9 Melbourne, AU, Rod Laver Arena
5/10 Melbourne, AU, Rod Laver Arena
5/13 Auckland, NZ, Spark Arena

Deftones 2026 Summer tour dates:

8/18 Berlin, DE, Parkbühne Wuhlheide
8/20 Charleville-Mézières, FR, Cabaret Vert 2026
8/23 London, U.K., Outbreak Fest 2026
8/25 Dublin, IE, Irish Museum of Modern Art
8/27 Edinburgh, U.K., Royal Highland Centre
8/29 Saint-Cloud, FR, Rock en Seine 2026
10/24 Fort Worth, TX, Sick New World Texas 2026

The post Deftones Drop New Merch to Support Local Youth Soccer Team appeared first on VICE.

The June sun beat down on the windshields of Japanese cars, and the Bosch cordless hedge trimmers whirred like cicadas. Middle-aged marketing execs on road racing bikes were taking deep breaths, readying themselves for the next diving sprint down to Box Hill, while women in yoga leggings the texture of honeycomb discussed exam results. Billy from the residential care home, who wanders the streets all day every day—thumping his bare chest, a dummy in his mouth to stop the voices—was nowhere to be seen.

This is the road where my parents live. Not the one I grew up on exactly, but somewhere I knew all too well, a place I had often come running back to. This time, it was 2PM and I was heading back from an ill-spent evening that had lasted too long and turned the daytime and nighttime inside out. The living room windows were open and I heard the faint crackle of early kick-off football. The Ring cameras on the doorbells seemed to follow me like the eyes of taxidermy in a haunted museum. 

As I walked, I thought about how this street had gone from being so normal, so pedestrian—a place for nurses and teachers and double glazers to carve out non-intrusive lives—to a Long Island-style outpost of City wealth. The street existed in a state of uncivic paranoia. Outsiders were flagged up like bandits on a neighborhood WhatsApp, images of their cars posted for local scrutiny. Apparently, I’d already been mentioned several times. 

And then, that humdrum suburban near-silence was exploded by something; a violent jangle scratched-out through some kind of primitive amplification system. The sound of half-formed hands working their way across nickel-wound strings and maplewood. 

“Outsiders were flagged up like bandits on a neighborhood WhatsApp… Apparently, I’d already been mentioned several times”

I stopped in my tracks, trying to work out if I had heard what I thought I had. Leaning toward the sound I tried decoding the register, the rhythm, the part that came next. It turned out my instincts had been right; it was the opening salvo of a song I hadn’t heard in a long, long time. It was a song I too used to play on a £60 practice amp, on a similar street, similarly badly: “Be Quiet and Drive” by Deftones, a peculiarly earnest slice of NorCal nu-metal that, back in 2002, ensnared the imagination of West London boys. 

Then it all came flooding back. The song seemed to be a genuinely Proustian impetus, in a way that many things touted as such are not. Robinsons fruit squash never transported me anywhere but the dentist; Jamie T didn’t take me back to long nights on Wimbledon Common; even methylenedioxy-methamphetamine isn’t portalling me like it used to. But hearing this really kicked up the butterflies in my stomach. It was more like past life therapy than French literature.  

I found myself in a world of heavy denim dragging through mud; cheap silver jewelry leaving green stains on hairless skin; the taste of warm Dr Pepper, gin, and stomach acid on its way out of my mouth; making out with a chubby girl in fairy wings. A part of my brain that I thought had died—or more accurately, had simply forgotten existed—reopened itself to me, and out through it came a torrent of long-lost characters and the myths that made them human. I remembered one local mosher who’d attached a full-sized license plate to his wallet chain. I remembered Amit Raj-Deu telling me that Marylin Manson sent a live puppy out into a mosh pit once and demanded it came back in nine pieces, or he wouldn’t finish his set. Where did this happen? “In America,” of course. 

I wondered if these people were on LinkedIn now.

That night, lying on my bed with the windows open, I wondered about the boy I imagined playing the song. How had he found it, and what had he found in it? Had a girl from school brushed him off, and now he wanted to drive and drive into the night, just like Chino Moreno did? Or was he younger than I assumed, and seeking flight from something darker? Could he be the son of someone my own age—perhaps even the son of a man who grew up with a license plate chained to his wallet? 

“I found myself in a world of heavy denim dragging through mud; cheap silver jewelry leaving green stains on hairless skin; the taste of warm Dr Pepper, gin, and stomach acid on its way out of my mouth; making out with a chubby girl in fairy wings. A part of my brain that I thought had died—or more accurately, had simply forgotten existed—reopened itself to me, and out through it came a torrent of long-lost characters and the myths that made them human”

It wasn’t the first time I’d been forced to consider the grunger era; the pitched battles between the nu-metal kids and whatever your town called people who wore Adidas popper trousers and stolen baseball caps. For most of my adulthood, that outsider aesthetic had been co-opted by fashion labels and SoundCloud rappers, analyzed and dissected by a million Instagram cultural theorists. It had been on the periphery of fashion for ten times longer than the original era lasted, but this seemed to be something different. It wasn’t an affectation or a retread. I could feel it. 

To this day, I have never seen the boy who was playing the 25-year-old Deftones song on the street where my parents live. He could be the coolest kid in class; he may not have a single friend in the world. But to me, something about the way he was letting it rip while hidden from view, pushing the street to think about him as it got on with taking its breaths, trimming its hedges, passing its exams, suggested that what he was broadcasting came from somewhere pure. 

I hope the song has given him a weapon to tackle the world with. But I also hope he isn’t taking the world too seriously, and that if there is a girl he’s playing it for—or at—he won’t one day wield it against her, while parroting some stupid line from a movie. I hope he doesn’t grow up making the mistakes that found me walking back down that road, into the safety of the past. 

Follow Clive Martin on X @clive_mart1n

This reminiscence 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 Exploding Suburban Silence appeared first on VICE.

Before Chi, Deftones was just me, Abe, Stephen, and a childhood friend of mine who played bass.

At that point, Abe was by far the most technically proficient musician out of all of us. He’s been playing since he was three years old; he’s always been a beast.

Back then, there was this other group around called Fallacy; they were a couple of years older than us but went to the same high school and were one of the biggest up-and-coming bands in Sacramento. They saw us play and snatched Abe. While we were super happy for our friend, it did leave us without a drummer, at least until our bass player started playing drums. 

And then that left us without a bass player. 

We met Chi the old school way. Stephen put a flyer up in the local music store with little strips you can tear off that had his phone number on. It was actually Chi’s brother that called. Him and Chi both played bass, and when Stephen told him what kind of music we were making he was like, ‘Oh, you want my brother.’ So one day this happy-go-lucky Asian-American guy with super long hair and a big crooked smile shows up at Stephen’s house. We started writing music together that same day.

I ended up moving in with him not long after, sharing a one-bedroom apartment just off the Sacramento State campus that cost $600 a month. Chi was still at college, and he had this deal where as long as he was attending classes his dad would pay half his rent. So Chi paid half the rent, and then I paid half of that, which was nothing. We covered it by working shifts serving food at the dorm cafeteria. I literally worked two hours a day, made enough to pay rent, and befriended a lot of the kids in the dorms. It was like going to college without actually going to class. 

Chi’s a few years older than me so he really felt like a big brother, taking me under his wing. We were like each other’s shadow. We lived together, we had the band, and we worked together at Tower Records too. We were there when we got the call that Deftones had been offered a deal with Maverick. We quit our jobs on the spot. Started touring. Sat across from each other on the bus. From the day I met him, we never left each other’s side. We were together every single day, man.

Chi never graduated in the end. He stopped going to class, but he didn’t tell his dad so he kept on paying the rent. Chi actually loved school, but things got really busy with the band. We were playing a lot; we did a lot of Bay Area shows where we’d get home at like three, four in the morning. It was the same for everyone. The band started taking priority over work, school, everything.

Chi was the self-proclaimed ‘business guy’ of the group. He was the oldest one in the band, and he would always say that he did all the hiring and firing, paid attention to the books, and stuff like that. And he did. There were so many years where I just didn’t pay attention to a lot of that stuff at all, knowing Chi would have it covered. He became the mediator when it was time to be serious, and he had a great way of taking on that role, but it did create a bit of tension for a while. It was like he was the ‘band dad,’ so as happy-go-lucky as he was, I felt like I had to answer to him a certain way. But a lot of it was just me not wanting to let him down. It got easier over the years, as we all grew up and started paying more attention to that side of things.

When Chi had the accident, the conversation of whether or not to continue the band went on for a long time. Six months, at least. There was just so much uncertainty. When someone’s in that state where they’re still here physically, but they’re unable to communicate, you just don’t know what to do. All we were thinking was, ‘Is he gonna come out of this?’ Meanwhile, everybody is asking us ‘How’s Chi? What’s up?’ and we didn’t have an answer. Not even his doctors had a clear answer. So we were in limbo, having these emotions and not knowing how to process any of them.

At first, the idea of getting back together wasn’t to start making new music or practice for a tour or anything like that. It was purely to play together again, because all our lives that’s all we’d ever known. So even though Chi wasn’t there, we could still be there for each other, doing what we would normally do. It was comforting for us to be able to process it together and dive into our creativity and keep active in that way. 

When it came to the bass… back then, it was more about building out the frequencies than it was searching for someone to fill a spot. We’d known Sergio Vega for years. We were huge fans of his playing in Quicksand. He was a friend of ours, and he was a friend of Chi’s as well, so we reached out to see if he’d be down to come to the studio and jam. We weren’t thinking we’d go on to make any records, or release new music, or do any of what we’ve done the last ten years or so. We just got together to hang out and play—to do what we’ve done for all of our adult lives.

Looking back, Chi would always fill the room. Even in our darkest times, he’d come in with these wild stories, turning whatever pain we were going through into something we could laugh about. That was when everything came into perspective, when we’d realize how lucky we were to have each other and the friendship that we’d built.

I think about him all the time. We all do. There’s not a day that goes by without a Chi story and the music he left us is just as special. He played in his own unexpected way, carrying light into the darkest moments, reminding us we weren’t alone.

This tribute 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 Remembering Chi Cheng appeared first on VICE.

People love to say that The Sopranos is multi-faceted; that what truly makes it a masterpiece is its ability to operate on many different levels at once. For instance, while others have lauded its thoughtful examinations of male fragility and the slow death of the American Empire, I got into it because of a meme page chronicling the various T-shirts worn by the main character’s teenage son.

Like most adolescent boys in the early 00s, AJ Soprano loved skateboarding, PlayStation 2, shouting “fuck” at his mum, Jackass, and alternative rock bands on cable TV. Chief among those acts were Deftones, yet I could not for the life of me remember them ever being referenced in the show. So I speed-ran every episode of The Sopranos, slowing down the tapes every time AJ’s bedroom came into shot, hunting for signs of them. This is what I found.

SEASON 1

What’s in AJ’s bedroom? Vans Ehkks shoes; Marilyn Manson T-shirt; dirt bike memorabilia; posters for the bands Stuck Mojo, Ulver, Moonspell, and Nevermore; verbal references to South Park; the concept of something being “dicked up”; an ADHD diagnosis.

The pilot opens on AJ’s 12th birthday, which is rained off, and he is extra sad because no one brings him any ziti. When he’s not downstairs playing Mario Kart, young AJ is usually huffing about up in his grotto, which is home to a desktop computer the size of a space station and the kind of baggy jeans and windbreakers that made up Chino Moreno’s own late 90s wardrobe. At this point IRL Deftones were on an Ozzfest tour of the U.S. and the logo of Slipknot, an opening act on the same tour, appears in one episode. Sadly, though, there is no Deftones at any point in series 1, which seems weird for a kid who’s got a Moonspell poster on his wall. 

SEASON 2

What’s in AJ’s bedroom? Limp Bizkit poster; backwards cap; “No sisters allowed” sign; big fat skate shoes he wears to visit his grandma in hospital; N64.

Tony officially takes over as head of the DiMeo crime family. Meanwhile, what’s his male heir doing? Joyriding in his parents’ car, hanging out at the mall, smoking weed in the garage, and experimenting with nihilism. As Chino Moreno himself sang: big mood. Exactly what a Deftones fan would be into. But where is the merch, bro? In this season, Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other artwork features prominently on the wall next to AJ’s window while a toy snake dangles opposite… could this be a private music precursor? Absolutely not. 

SEASON 3

What’s in AJ’s bedroom? Osiris hat, worn backwards; Slipknot merch (1 x poster, 1 x T-shirt); Adio shoebox; wallet chain; Coal Chamber hoodie.

Shot in 2000 and airing in 2001, season 3 dovetails beautifully with the release of White Pony. Conditions were primed for the iconic logo to appear on something, somewhere. Following the death of his grandmother, we see him blasting Slipknot at his desk (various forms of Slipknot merch notably enter his wardrobe this season, including the iconic maroon windbreaker). In the next episode, he’s in a Coal Chamber hoodie. And yet, again, no Deftones. This is beginning to get frustrating. The pool party scene in the “Back to School (Mini Maggit)” video could literally be a shot from episode 9, when AJ and friends break into the school pool and trash it. 

SEASON 4

What’s in AJ’s bedroom? Pantera T-shirt; Fear Factory poster; Ouija board; farts. 

Things take a heavy turn for the rest of the cast in this season, but life is on the up for Anthony Junior. After narrowly escaping military school, he bags Devin, his first ever baddie. Their storyline in episode 6 revolves around trying to find a moment to get frisky in peace, but Carmela keeps interrupting, so they go to “study” in Meadow’s dorm room at Columbia. The uncharacteristically smooth “How Does It Feel” by D’Angelo plays as they make-out, which feels jarring and inappropriate for a boy who was listening to Coal Chamber just a few episodes ago. Couldn’t a “Knife Prty” or a “Digital Bath” moment have worked here? 

SEASON 5

What’s in AJ’s bedroom? Mudvayne concert tickets; drum kit; a complete lack of eyebrow.

It’s 2004 when this season drops and Deftones’ self-titled album had been released the summer before. This is the era of AJ’s life when he starts playing the drums, almost gets eaten by a bear in the yard, and returns from a Mudvayne concert in NYC with both eyebrows shaved off before moving out to live with Tony in his dead nan’s house. Spoiler alert: He does not turn his new bedroom into a shrine to Deftones. But there is one other potential route worth exploring: Mudvayne only made one appearance in New York in 2003, when the season was being scripted. On Tuesday, March 11, at Northern Lights in Clifton Park. It seems too far from the city to be the same one AJ attended—but Metallica’s Summer Sanitarium tour did have Mudvayne opening, and guess what: Deftones played just after (with Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, and Metallica following in that order). Sadly, of course, this was in real life, not an episode of The Sopranos. 

SEASON 6

What’s in AJ’s bedroom? Blockbuster Video job; Aqua Teen Hunger Force; A T-shirt with a snake on it that says “Immortal”; a long-sleeve shirt that says “Underground”; Trivium and Tool posters; a Quiksilver sticker; full-blown hatred for the state of the world.

The final season isn’t too kind to AJ, who starts out as a long-haired 20-year-old and ends up aged 22 with gel spikes and a goatee. Tony is in hospital, AJ unsuccessfully tries to take out a hit on his Uncle Junior, develops a coke problem, loses his job at Blockbuster Video, almost joins the army, then regrettably tries to drown himself in the family pool swimming after his fiancée Blanca calls it quits. (Also his car blows up, but he loves that.)

Again, every single thing about this feels extremely Deftones, to the point where you start to wonder if there’s no trace of them in the series because in Sopranosworld, AJ has literally taken Chino Moreno’s place in the universe. What makes it doubly confounding is that although hanging out on the bottle-popping NYC club scene partially changes AJ’s music taste and social circle, his bedroom remains as greebo as ever. There are Quiksilver and Slipknot logo stickers on his mirror, Tool and Trivium posters on the walls, and a huge photo of Incubus drummer Joe Pasillas by his bed. 

Then things take an interesting turn. At several points across season 6, images of another band make an appearance. It’s a band you wouldn’t necessarily expect AJ Soprano to be into, given his previous tastes. It’s… Sugarcult?! For a guy who was into Portuguese goth metal aged 12, and who has just come into possession of a debilitating cocaine habit, mediocre SoCal power-pop feels like a choice that is counterintuitive at best—until you learn who their boss was fucking. “Our manager was possibly dating someone on [the Sopranos] set design team,” the group’s guitarist Marko Desantis once admitted.

I’m not saying Sugarcult screwed Deftones out of their rightful place as AJ Soprano’s favorite band. But I am saying that someone in their entourage did.

Follow Hatti on Instagram: @hattirex

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 A Season-by-Season Inventory of AJ Soprano’s Bedroom appeared first on VICE.

Back in late summer, VICE sent Ahmed Alramly and photographer Bill Taylor to Los Angeles with a simple mission: to party with and photograph local Deftones fans, to buy them as many drinks as they wanted, and to find out what the band means to them.

This is the story of what Ahmed and Bill heard while navigating the pool halls, dive bars, and hillside beauty spots in and around the city, stories that ranged from, essentially, “they are just fucking cool” to more heartfelt thoughts on Latino representation in heavy music.

Nu metal as a whole would never have existed without Latin Americans. Latinos are historically well represented in the genre, there in the ranks of some of the Discman era’s most definitive bands, including Ill Niño, Coal Chamber, Korn, Static-X, Incubus, P.O.D., Papa Roach, Rage Against the Machine, Fear Factory, and a bunch more. Arguably the prize pig of the bunch, though they sit well outside the ‘nu-metal’ label now, is Deftones.

Hailing from the predominately Hispanic Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento, Deftones is embraced by fans across California and beyond for its Latin connections. The father of frontman Chino Moreno and the mother of lead guitarist Steph Carpenter are both Mexican (Chino’s mother also has Mexican ancestry, as well as being part Native American, part Irish, and part Chinese).

The band, for its part, has tended to take the popular Gen X position of shrugging off labels. When asked about their identity early on, their usual response was to say that they’re from a “mixed” area of California and bill themselves as, simply, a metal band. “I don’t think we really think of it at all,” Moreno told an interviewer in 1997, who remarked on them being “two Mexicans, a Chinese guy, and a white dude.” But they’ve leaned into their roots more in recent years, be it through their annual Dia de Los Deftones festival held on the Day of the Dead, or acknowledging the connection they share with fans in certain parts of the world.

“I notice we have a big Latin following and it’s awesome to see faces, familiar faces, that you don’t know, but they look like my brothers and sisters, my cousins,” Moreno told GRAMMY.com in 2020. “There’s this connection that’s there, that’s just sort of unspoken.”

Below, Angelenos tell us what role Deftones has played in their lives.

MIA

“You know, in Latino culture, music’s fucking sad. It’s heavy, it’s sad, it has a lot of strings, and I think that is a natural gateway to getting into emo and like, hardcore shit. Everything’s deeply emotional. It conjures up shit. You know, Deftones is straight-up crooner shit. Chino’s a crooner! It’s very much boleros and classic Latin music. I opened for Deftones once, and Chino came up to me and said, ‘That was a good set.’ I always loved that he did that.”

Amor (below, far left)

“My older sister put me onto Deftones—I was probably in like, sixth grade, and White Pony was the first album I heard. I love them so much. Seeing a Latino frontman singing the kind of music that he was, pioneering their own type of genre—people call it ‘nu metal’ but really they are their own thing—like, a Mexican doing that was really cool. Now, as an adult, I resonate to that. For me and everyone else who appreciates seeing Black and brown representation in these alternative genres of music, Deftones is important.”

Gabrielle

“I moved to LA 11 years ago, to dance. I took ballet and jazz classes, then fell in love with pole dancing. I’ve been dancing at Jumbo’s Clown Room forever. I grew up in Palm Springs and my parents were into grunge, so I always liked rock. I love dancing to Deftones. ‘You’ve Seen the Butcher’? Best song ever; sexiest song in the world. I’m dancing my life away to Deftones, wherever it takes me. I’m a witch, I’m over 100 years old (laughs). Witchy in life.”

Christian

“I’m 29. I skate, I’m in a band with my brother—we have no name yet, but we’ve been jamming every day since I was 14 and he was 12. Growing up in middle school, people were always like ‘Wassup rocker?’ I got in so many fights, but I’ll beat your ass in skinny jeans.

“Our backyard shows now are in the hood, so you get all types of fools pulling up. Random ass cholos just doing NOS. I don’t know my real dad but I’m lucky to be here, I beat all the statistics. My stepdad gang banged, and my mom had me at 15 in Inglewood. She low-key held it down, she made sure I wasn’t fucking up too much. With Deftones, it was just cool to see people do shit that looked like me.”

Creative Director: Ahmed Alramly
Photographer: Bill Taylor
Make-Up: Selena Ruiz
Hair: Anastasia Terebova
Casting Director: Alex Carranza
Featuring: Giselle Lopez, Mia Carucci, Gabrielle, Christian Chapo, Amor Morales, Andrew Bahena, Boogz
Fixer: Speedy
Intro Text: Emma Garland

This photo 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.

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