"We're not trying to make sexualised music." Deftones' Chino Moreno on the nu metal revival, conspiracy theories and whatever the hell Baddiecore is

Have you heard of the word ‘baddiecore’?” Confusion clouds Chino Moreno’s face as he processes our question. The Deftones frontman is sitting in his garden in Portland, Oregon, on a sunny Friday morning, and we might as well be asking him if he’s heard about aliens landing.

“What is it called? Bodycore?”

“Baddiecore. Like, B-A-D-D-I-E-CORE.”

“No, I’ve not…”

We’ve been talking about how Deftones are bigger now than they’ve ever been, thanks to a popularity boom on TikTok. Since January 2022, the hashtag #deftones has had eight billion views. Videos featuring Change (In The House Of Flies), Mascara, Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away), Sextape and My Own Summer (Shove It) have been viewed a calculator-busting 12 billion times.

This surge of interest from Gen Z has translated to ticket sales. In the UK, Deftones have just done three prestigious gigs, playing to 6,000 people at Halifax’s Piece Hall, another 6,000 at Cornwall’s Eden Project, and 25,000 at London’s Crystal Palace Park (an appearance at Glastonbury was cancelled at the last minute, as Chino needed a sick day) – and all this when they’re not even promoting a new record.

When they return to the UK and Ireland in February 2026 to tour 10th album Private Music, they’ll do six arena dates, performing for a combined total of more than 90,000 people. It’s the same story in the US. As for baddiecore? We’ll come back to it later.

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Chino Moreno is relaxed today. He’s got some interviews this morning, and he’ll spend the weekend wiring up his new home studio. Meanwhile, Deftones have just released My Mind Is A Mountain, the first single from Private Music, to widespread positivity.

“I think it’s a great song,” Chino says confidently. “But I think the album is even greater.”

In 2025, Deftones might be elder statesmen in age, but they are still relevant. Thirty years after debut album Adrenaline was released, they’ve long transcended the nu metal scene they were lumped in with, and stand as an original band in their own right.

While their third album, 2000’s White Pony, was a landmark, they have consistently released records without a drop in quality – even the less acclaimed Saturday Night Wrist (2006) and Gore (2016) have been reappraised in recent years, particularly the former’s song Cherry Waves – capitalising on what’s often referred to as the ‘push and pull’ between Stephen Carpenter’s weighty riffs and Chino’s ethereal vocals.

It’s a sound that’s influenced other bands, but that no one has been able to copy. Now comes new album Private Music. Produced by Nick Raskulinecz, who worked on 2010’s Diamond Eyes and 2012’s Koi No Yokan, its dreamlike atmosphere nods to that era, but it buzzes with additional confidence. It’s also the first album to be released since the upswing in Deftones’ popularity with the younger generation – a phenomenon Chino is vaguely aware of.

“The funniest thing is probably when my daughter’s friends started showing interest in our band. I was like, ‘Really?’,” he frowns. “And back then, she was still in high school – she’s in college now. And then I was curious about it, because I’ve never had a TikTok account, so I didn’t see any of that physically. I was just being told about it.”

Search for #deftones on TikTok, and you’ll come across videos of people lip-synching and dancing to their songs in gothy outfits they’ve picked out, jokes about life before and after hearing Deftones that involve trading normie culture for the alternative, and various permutations of wanting a boyfriend/girlfriend that’s into the band. But it’s clear that all the creators absolutely love this band. And that love doesn’t show any sign of abating. 7

“Part of it could be a trend,” Chino considers. “But it’s been a good three or four years since the trend started. And it’s only growing, which is great, but also it’s unsolicited, too. I think if we were on TikTok and we were just like, ‘Yo, check this out’, and trying to market ourselves to the younger generation, it would probably come off that way. And the fact is that we don’t do that, it’s kind of what now is word of mouth, which is those platforms.”

Chino has noticed longtime fans bringing their teenage children along to the pre-show meet-and-greets, and teenagers who have just discovered the band bringing their parents along. But why does he think Deftones’ music has connected with this new generation of people?

“It’s hard to say.” He pauses. “I’d like to think that it’s not music that’s so dated to a certain time. It’s so funny, because we tried hard not to be lumped in with nu metal when nu metal was big, and then we kind of had to do it again with the nu metal resurgence – like, hoping that we weren’t going to get lumped in once again. I think we do at times, but we didn’t want to be dated back then, and the musical choices we made were not going to pigeonhole us into that space and time.”

Chino’s right to acknowledge the nu metal resurgence. Korn, often mentioned in the same breath as Deftones during the 90s, are bigger than they’ve been in years, and headlined Download for the first time in June. Limp Bizkit re-emerged in 2021 with Still Sucks, their first album in a decade, and have subsequently done arena show after arena show. Linkin Park just played Wembley Stadium. A rising tide lifts all ships.

But amid this, there’s a specific sideline in Deftones worship, which has kept the band in metal’s cultural consciousness. The media celebrations and vinyl reissues for the 20th anniversary of 2000’s already-classic White Pony raised its profile even further, its galloping-horse artwork as iconic as the Black Flag bars when it comes to tattoos. There are ‘Deftones-core’ bands creating moody, intriguing soundscapes, such as Vowws (Chino guested on the song Structure Of Love II in 2019), Loathe (Chino gave 2020’s Two-Way Mirror a shoutout on social media), Vexes, Split Chain and Thornhill.

Then, there are the artists that don’t explicitly sound like Deftones, but acknowledge their influence – Australia’s Kim Dracula and UK bruisers Graphic Nature are named after songs from Saturday Night Wrist and Koi No Yokan respectively. Chino’s also right to call Deftones’ music timeless. But there’s something else going on, too. Something a little more… baddiecore.

Baddiecore, we explain to Chino, describes bands such as Sleep Token and Bad Omens. Music people like because they find it sexy. We just wondered if he’d heard the word ‘baddiecore’, or heard of thirst trap metal?

“Ha ha ha! I have not, but there’s another genre that we have to escape at some point, right?” he laughs. “It’s part of growing up, those feelings, and it’s not something that just dissipates as you get older. Hopefully everybody still has desires as they grow old, you know what I mean?

"And I think connect with it. I grew up loving a lot of romanticised music. Obviously Depeche Mode, I’ve always claimed my love for them, and that was something that was always present in their songs, and I’ve always connected with. So I think, maybe in a roundabout way, some of that has seeped into our music.”

The word ‘baddiecore’ was coined by Craig Reynolds, drummer of Stray From The Path, host of The Downbeat podcast, and Metal Twitter king/playful shit-poster seemingly turned linguist, who put a name on something in the ether. Since Sleep Token went viral on TikTok with The Summoning at the start of 2023, there had been talk about how heavy music had become hot and heavy.

‘How do sub-genre names stick?’ Craig wrote on Twitter/X in August 2023. ‘Like djent and nu metal etc? Because I got one that I call bands like Sleep Token, Bad Omens and Spiritbox. Baddiecore. Metalcore with enough pop music crossover and sex appeal that normie hot people like it. I hate it so much I love it.’

The original idea has gone beyond metalcore, with legacy bands being pulled into the baddiecore orbit. Spotify has a public playlist called Allure, with the tagline ‘for the baddies’, featuring Deftones’ Change (In The House Of Flies), alongside Health’s cover of Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away) – sidenote: Health have been calling themselves ‘cum metal’ for years – and Bitches Brew from Chino’s side-project, (Crosses).

Baddiecore isn’t a sound anymore. It’s a vibe, and a sexy one at that. A ‘baddie’ just means a confident woman. And while there’s often a sexual undertone to the Deftones-themed TikToks, many of them are weirdly wholesome, and a lot of them are made by female fans.

“I think that’s awesome,” says Chino. “But I will say that we definitely don’t go into making music with that in mind, right? And it’s funny even looking at a couple of comments; no one’s even heard the record yet, and they’re looking at the album cover because there’s a snake on it. ‘Oh, it must be sexual’, you know? But yeah, we definitely don’t go into making a record, thinking that we’re trying to make sexualised music. It’s just a part of what we like, and what speaks to us when we’re coming up with the music.”

That new album title plays into the illusion, though. Private Music!

“Yeah, right. That’s another thing, too. Basically that was a folder on my desktop where I kept all the demos as we were working on the record, and also, there is a record by the band Tangerine Dream, called The Private Music Of Tangerine Dream. I always loved that title. And I considered that at first, like ‘The Private Music Of Deftones’, but then I said, ‘Maybe it’s a little too long and pretentious, and let me just stick with Private Music.’”

With many women embracing – and creating – the current Deftones fandom, some have faced casual misogyny. To pick a random example from TikTok: in September 2024, a young female creator shared a video of herself modelling her white Deftones tee, with the caption: ‘Wearing my Deftones top to my first lecture so I attract the baddies and make the right friends.’ Comments from men included: ‘Name 3 Deftones songs’ and ‘You just look like a poser.’ What’s Chino’s take on this?

“Yeah, I can see that. I think shaming anybody for what they like is kind of ridiculous, right? Honestly, I listened to everything in high school and hung out with everybody. I hung out with the goth kids, and with the jocks,” he remembers, bringing to mind the video for 2000’s Back To School (Mini Maggit). It was this melting away of boundaries, allowing for a combination of different influences, Chino explains, that made Deftones what they are.

“There were different cliques, but I think the segregation started to break down, and I felt like, musically, I followed that,” he explains. “Stephen, back then, would write the majority of the music. And he was a straight metalhead, right? So right away the music was put into a heavy category. And I tried to scream along, and do whatever I could do to fit. But that’s not what came to me naturally. Naturally, I wanted to weave melody into that somehow. I think obviously Deftones is Deftones at this point, but still to this day, what is that?”

This spike in popularity couldn’t have come at a better time for Chino to enjoy it. We last spoke in August 2020, ahead of Deftones releasing their ninth album, Ohms. It was the day before the frontman was due to move from the small former logging town of Bend, Oregon, to the state’s largest city, Portland. He talked about how he’d been spending too much time alone and feeling “sort of slightly depressed”.

The pandemic heaped on even more isolation. In an attempt to understand his feelings, he started therapy. Today, he’s getting ready to move to another new place, still in Portland, while the therapy has helped immeasurably.

“Therapy is not something where they just fix anything, right? You learn different ways of working through your emotions. And so it’s always a work in progress, but I think that is part of growing,” he considers. “Now, as I grow older, there’s tons of things to be happy about, and I’m very happy.”

Something else has contributed to Chino’s happiness: he’s been sober for three years. After decades of normalised drinking in the entertainment industry, he looked around him and saw that friends and colleagues who’d given up alcohol had found their lives had become better. There was no dramatic ‘rock bottom’, but rather a moment of realisation that he was more dependent on it for relieving feelings of discomfort than he’d like.

“I’ll be pretty candid here. I’d already quit drinking for a few weeks – I didn’t tell anybody, it was just something I was doing for myself – and I was having a bad day,” he begins. “So I went down into the garage, and I have a little fridge in there with beers in it, and I cracked a beer, and I sat on an ice chest, and my wife walked in. She’s like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I was like, ‘I can’t handle this, whatever.’ So what am I doing? I’m opening a beer because I can’t handle this. So I was like, ‘Oh, well, that’s pretty telling right there, right?’ So, the very next day, I was like, ‘Alright. I’m going to try to make a change.’

“And even still then, I wasn’t 100% committed. I was just like, ‘I’m just going to try it.’ But then once I got a month into sobriety, I was like, ‘Wow!’”

He lets out a long sigh of relief. “I’m still a work in progress, obviously. I don’t want to sit here and say, ‘Everything’s rainbows every day’, but it’s definitely a way better place to be, right?”

More days with rainbows than there previously were? “Yes, yes.”

One of the things Chino’s grateful for in 2025 is his career. Deftones formed in 1988 in Sacramento, and released debut album Adrenaline in 1995. They were in their late teens and early 20s, and skateboarded every day. They’d rehearse at each other’s houses, and didn’t have any expectations beyond playing a few local shows.

“It was just part of our youth and coming of age, and we captured it on record,” he says. “I can hear it when I listen back to it. And I hear being… I shouldn’t say ‘mad at the world’, but that youthful passion and aggression.”

As the years went on, Chino’s enthusiasm for making albums fluctuated. Even Ohms felt so tough to make, that “by the end of it, I just wanted to be done with it”.

“There was probably some years where it felt more like a task,” he says. “When it started out, we were kids, experimenting and enjoying ourselves and having fun. And there’s something pure about that. But along the way, that sort of got lost in the job part of it. All these years later, I’m coming back to that a little bit. I don’t feel the need anymore that I have to make music. I like to make music, and I want to continue to like to make music.”

And so, to Private Music. If Ohms’s crushing opener Genesis reflected Chino’s shifting psychological state (‘I finally achieve balance / approaching a delayed rebirth’), then driving lead single My Mind Is A Mountain, with its talk of ‘negative space in cycles’ destroying our mental health, is a companion piece.

“The song is saying that it’s normal to feel extreme highs and sometimes extreme lows,” he explains. Private Music is an essential record full of big Steph Carpenter riffs, cryptic lyrics and enveloping washes of sound. With sonic echoes of Diamond Eyes’ title track, Souvenir stands out as a love song Gen Z will embrace immediately.

“It definitely has this feeling, like being swept away. I found a new tuning on my guitar, and I started playing these little guitar chords in the verses, and they felt romantic,” he smiles. “To me, it became a culmination of this fantasy, just a trip into connecting in another reality. I’ve written a lot of songs about that. It’s always been something that’s fascinated me.”

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Snakes aside, there’s an elephant in the room. In 2020, Stephen Carpenter went on a podcast called Tin Foil Hat With Sam Tripoli, where he claimed that, among other things, the Earth was flat and vaccines didn’t work. In an episode of The Peer Pleasure Podcast, Chino wondered if marijuana was having an influence on his bandmate: “The weed probably has a lil’ bit to do with his conspiracies and this and that… sitting at home, just looking on whatever sites he looks at. Probably doesn’t help being smoked out.”

In 2022, Stephen posted a video announcing that he would no longer be playing internationally, and later revealed that anxiety was preventing him from getting on a plane. Post pandemic, he was also worried about getting stuck in a far-off destination, he told the Rock Feed podcast, “and then they want to jab me with something”.

Lance Jackman and Shaun Lopez have been covering guitar duties for Deftones’ overseas dates. But can Chino clarify why Stephen won’t fly?

“I don’t want to speak for him. And even if I could, I still don’t have an answer,” says Chino. “Really I don’t. It’s still something that I think he is figuring out. And if he does have an answer, I think it’d be great if one day he would share it. But yeah, we support him. We have to. He’s our friend. And his health, be it physically or mentally, always takes the forefront of anything.”

In an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music, which came out a week ago, the band sat together at a table, respectfully allowing each other time to talk. Even though they’ve been through different things, it looked like they were with each other.

“Yeah. I think that’s what it comes down to. It’s sad, I want him onstage with us at every show. If you ask me what I prefer, I want him there every day, every time we do anything, with the band. But it literally comes down to: there’s two ways to deal with it. We accept what he can and will do, or we just don’t play. And we want to play.”

In that same interview, Steph revealed that he was a Type 2 diabetic. He knew something was wrong when Deftones played Coachella last year, and all he could think about was not falling over onstage.

“That is what I considered to be my bottom,” he said. “I’m eating right, I’m exercising. I’m just trying to rebuild me. I throw around the terms ‘blessing’ and ‘God’ all the time, because all of this has woken me up to that kind of reality. I’m very grateful to be here, because I had no idea how close to being gone I was.”

Health is not something he or Chino take for granted, and nor is their relationship. In 2016, Stephen admitted he initially didn’t want to play on Gore as he didn’t feel invested in the music, leading fans to worry about a fracture in the band.

“I think that was a learning experience, and after the record was finished, Stephen came to me and we spoke deeply about it,” Chino told us in 2020.

On Deftones’ last tour, the pair shared a bus alongside their photographer and assistant, and will again on the next one. With Chino usually in Portland and Steph living in Southern California, it allows them the opportunity to catch up and hang out, just like they would have done in the Adrenaline days. Well, almost…

“It’s really great, having this time as we’re older, and us bonding,” says Chino. “Stephen gets very obsessed about anything, whether it’s cameras, or technology or whatever. Now his obsession is his blood sugar. So every night, he’s looking on his phone. He’s like, ‘Yo, I’m down to this mode, whatever.’ And our bus is super-clean. Obviously there’s no alcohol, no sugar. And it’s great for both of us, because every night we get on the bus and we talk about the show, and then we talk about our health and our stuff. It sounds a little boomery…”

You’re not a boomer, though! You’re Gen X, surely. He smiles. “OK, well, it still sounds boomery, to me!”

But at this point, it hardly matters: Deftones transcend generations. They are baddiecore. And they are only getting bigger.

Private Music is out now via Reprise/Warner Records. Deftones play Aftershock on October 2 and tour the UK from February 12 2026. For the full list of dates, visit their official website.