The Deftones album Chino Moreno still thinks has “stood the test of time”
If you were an American high school kid in the late 1990s, there was a veritable cornucopia of CD options available for some good old miserable teenage rage conductance on your drive home.
You could get politically angry with Rage Against the Machine; sexually angry with Korn or Marilyn Manson; grungily angry with Alice in Chains; or hip-hopilly angry with Eminem or DMX, not to mention all the glorious punk, thrash metal, and screamo bands right there at the ready.
No matter which direction your angst carried you, however, the odds were good that you’d eventually find your way to the one album every pissed-off kid was legally required to own at the time; the one that checked every box and made you feel like your version of wallowing had somehow achieved a higher IQ.
This was The Deftones’ Around the Fur, the 1997 album best known for the monster singles ‘My Own Summer (Shove It)’ and ‘Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)’. Nearly 30 years on, it remains arguably the most revisitable of those late ‘90s anger records among ageing Millennials. The ageing Gen X singer of the Deftones, Chino Moreno, has never lost his love for it either.
“To this day, it’s one of my favourites, maybe the favourite,” Moreno told Revolver earlier this year. “There’s this unbridled energy we managed to capture right then and there. That record has really stood the test of time, and I love it for that.”
Part of the reason Around the Fur seems to have aged so well is that it never quite broke into the mainstream in the same way a lot of the Deftones’ hard rock and nu metal peers did in ’97, or even the way their own follow-up record, 2000’s White Pony, ultimately would. This album, which was the follow-up to the band’s 1995 debut Adrenaline, wasn’t certified Gold in the US until two years after its release, and didn’t go Platinum until 2011; a real testament to how its reputation has grown largely through word-of-mouth and hand-me-downs from older siblings to younger, and eventually parents to their kids.
Sure, a high schooler who already liked Korn in 1997 could easily find plenty to like about the Deftones. But the latter band, Sacramento stoners though they may have been, were also pulling influences out of quite a few more hats, with some sonic shoegaze layering that kinda sounded like My Bloody Valentine dressed up in metal with a dash of Faith No More and a top-tier screamer of a frontman, dressed in a black T-shirt rather than a Halloween costume.
“We’ve had people think we play, like, rockabilly,” Moreno told the Decatur Herald and Review when Around the Fur came out, “and some people think we’re a ska band. But so many people have heard about us now that we don’t surprise them anymore. Everyone knows we shove it down their throats.”
Moreno was 23 years old when he recorded Around the Fur, and Deftones have released eight more albums since, most recently this year’s Private Music. A lot of artists, when out promoting a new record, aren’t inclined to get nostalgic and acknowledge an earlier work as anything superior to what came after, but Chino is somewhat refreshing in this regard, as he has always singled out Around the Fur, both as a record and an experience, with uniquely glowing terms.
“It sounds very immediate,” Moreno told the Morning Call newspaper in Pennsylvania around the time of the record’s 15th anniversary. “We recorded that record in a pretty short frame of time. It took like four months from when we started writing it until it was done being mixed. And everybody was just in a super creative space…”
Concluding, “There was no second-guessing. I think there was a lot of confidence coming off of the Adrenaline record, so I figured I could outdo that record by miles. [Around the Fur] has always been my favourite Deftones record to this day.”
