Chino Moreno says Deftones got “lazy” following ‘White Pony’ success
Deftones frontman Chino Moreno has opened up about how the band’s early success impacted their ethos of making music together.
After relative success with their 1995 debut Adrenaline and 1997 follow-up Around the Fur, it was the 2000 album White Pony that sent the band into the stratosphere. It remains their best-selling album to date.
Opening up recently with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Moreno admitted that the stomping success of White Horse led them to acting “lazy” early on. He mused, “There were times in our career, though, where there were lows. Maybe from the outside, you couldn’t really see it, but from the inside, we just weren’t firing…”
He continued, “I don’t want to say we were being dishonest with ourselves, but maybe just lazy. I could say, talking about myself personally, around the White Pony time, when we did something that was against the grain, and it was left of what was happening at the time, commercially, in music. And it worked.”
Moreno also put a lot of emphasis on “luck” at the beginning of their career. “We went in the studio to make that record with, like, not really any songs. We had a couple ideas, but we wrote a lot of it in the studio. It was just that I feel like there was some luck with that. And because that album was so successful, I was sort of tricked into believing, like, ‘Oh well, I can just do anything, and people are gonna like it,’ right?”
White Pony debuted at three on the Billboard 200 in the US. It also won a Grammy for Best Metal Performance for the song ‘Elite’. Due to this, Moreno was lulled into a false sense of security.
He reflected, “So then I feel like I got a little lazy on the next couple of records, where it was just like, not realizing that, like with anything in life — that lesson my dad and teachers have [been teaching] me forever, like, what you put into something is what you get out of it, right? Because I got lucky [by] kind of just doing whatever, and it worked. So, I had to learn the hard way, back again.”
However, their new album is full of “passion and honesty,” which Moreno feels a lot more content with. Private Music will be released on August 22nd.
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