Deftones grew from a Sacramento garage jam into a Grammy-winning metal band
Three skateboarding friends from the same Sacramento high school began jamming in Stephen Carpenter's garage around 1988. Their guitarist had taught himself while stuck in a wheelchair after a car hit him. A label scout caught them playing to a nearly empty room in Los Angeles, and that late set got them signed.
Chino Moreno loved Bad Brains, Depeche Mode and the Cure; Carpenter was a metalhead who had learned by playing along to Metallica and Anthrax while recovering from being struck on his skateboard at 15. A long-told story says the driver's settlement bought the band's gear, but drummer Abe Cunningham has called it false. Carpenter coined the name by adding tones to the hip hop word def, a pun on tone deaf. Bassist Chi Cheng joined in 1990, and after several drummer swaps Cunningham returned in 1993.
The debut Adrenaline, released in October 1995, did not sell at first. Relentless touring, word of mouth and early internet promotion pushed it past 220,000 copies, and it eventually went platinum in 2008. Moreno recorded his vocals live in the room with the band on a hand-held microphone. Around the Fur in 1997 broke them on radio and MTV with My Own Summer, which later turned up on The Matrix soundtrack.
For White Pony in 2000 they spent four months in the studio, their longest stretch yet, and resisted pressure to finish sooner. Keyboardist and turntablist Frank Delgado had become a full member, and Moreno deliberately stopped writing about himself, inventing storylines instead. The album entered the Billboard chart at No. 3, sold over 1.3 million copies in the US, and its track Elite won the Grammy for Best Metal Performance.
In 2008, while the band worked on an album called Eros, Cheng was badly hurt in a car crash and never recovered, dying in 2013. The group shelved Eros and brought in bassist Sergio Vega, going on to release a run of acclaimed records from Diamond Eyes in 2010 to Private Music in 2025.
Source: Deftones
