Photo by Patrick Ford/Redferns
Deftones' third album pulled sounds from far outside metal's borders, and the rest of the genre spent years catching up.
When White Pony arrived on June 20, 2000, nu metal was at its commercial peak. Korn and Limp Bizkit were selling millions of records, major labels were chasing the same audience, and the path forward for a successful heavy band seemed obvious. Deftones ignored it.
Their third album pushed deeper into texture and mood. Chino Moreno had been listening heavily to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, and traces of that record run throughout White Pony. Guitars swell and dissolve into the background while Frank Delgado's turntables and keyboards add depth and movement, melodies surfacing and disappearing between Stephen Carpenter's massive riffs. The album's range is apparent almost immediately. "Digital Bath" unfolds patiently, built on tension and atmosphere. A few tracks later, "Elite" hits with enough force to earn the band the 2001 Grammy for Best Metal Performance. "Change (In the House of Flies)," meanwhile, became an unlikely radio hit and introduced Deftones to a much wider audience.
The album went platinum, the first in Deftones' catalog, and remains their best-selling release. Its success mattered because White Pony never sounded engineered for mass appeal. The record followed its own instincts, moving from crushing heaviness to dreamlike passages without warning and without concern for where metal was supposed to fit at the turn of the millennium.
In 2000, very few heavy records sounded like this. "Teenager" barely resembles a metal song, and "Knife Party" slips from hypnotic restraint into chaos. Even the album's most aggressive moments feel surrounded by space. White Pony made atmosphere structural, as central to the songs as any riff.
Its influence only sharpened as the years passed. Heavy bands leaned into shoegaze textures and electronics, writing songs that breathed and took their time. You can hear the shift across multiple generations of bands, though few carry the album's imprint more openly than Loathe. Their 2020 album I Let It In and It Took Everything moves between shimmering melody and punishing heaviness with the same confidence White Pony displayed two decades earlier. Tracks like "Is It Really You?" feel built on a similar understanding of tension, where the quiet moments carry as much weight as the loud ones.
They are far from alone. Spiritbox weave soaring vocal melodies into dense, down-tuned arrangements, Holy Fawn stretch post-rock scale across walls of distortion, and cursetheknife draw openly from shoegaze while keeping a heavy foundation underneath. Sleep Token, meanwhile, built one of the decade's biggest success stories on dramatic shifts in texture and intensity. None sound particularly similar to Deftones. All arrived in a landscape where records like White Pony had already expanded the possibilities.
Twenty-six years later, White Pony still feels remarkably current. The textures that stood apart in 2000 have become part of heavy music's vocabulary. New bands still pull from its atmosphere and scale, while the record itself remains as immersive and unpredictable as the day it arrived.
