On Private Music, Deftones sound like a band both scaling great peaks and plunging into shadowy depths. It’s their most doom-laden and atmospheric release in years—an album that leans heavily into monolithic riffs and dense textures without ever losing the dreamlike lift that’s made their sound so unmistakable for decades.

The album opens with the immense “My Mind Is a Mountain,” a track that immediately sets the emotional and sonic stakes. Guitars come in like seismic waves—immovable, massive—while the drums roll with a slow, thunderous patience. Chino Moreno’s voice, draped in reverb, floats ghostlike above the density, giving the track a sense of weightless dread. It’s hypnotic and spacious, evoking Mastodon-like doom while still radiating that unmistakable Deftones ache.

From there, the album explores darker, more cavernous terrain. “Locked Club” digs deep into an alt-metal groove that’s as mesmerizing as it is suffocating. Chugging guitars pulse in sync with hushed whispers and degraded vocal textures, creating a soundscape that feels more about scale and dread than precision. It’s not technical showmanship—it’s mood architecture. This early stretch of Private Music establishes what might be the record’s defining strength: riffs that don’t just serve songs, but become the emotional core of them—living, breathing entities of pressure and tone.

But Private Music isn’t a one-dimensional wall of heaviness. Tracks like “Ecdysis” and “Infinite Source” show the band’s more fluid and introspective side. There’s a push and pull between tension and release, distortion and clarity. Vocals at times rise crystal-clear and vulnerable, and at others are buried under fog, reinforcing atmosphere but occasionally dulling emotional immediacy. The guitars, meanwhile, shift between venomous swipes and more ambient drift, often within the same song. This dynamic—the balance between force and fragility—is at the core of the album’s emotional weight.

The heart of the record lives in its slow-burning centerpiece, “Souvenir.” Clocking in at six minutes, it starts with a surprising splash of classic rock tonality before dissolving into a wash of whispering vocals, sparse percussion, and doom-soaked guitar lines. A gradual transformation unfolds, as the song moves from grounded warmth into murky experimentalism, with haunting synths closing it out. Even when the distortion returns, there’s a restraint—an emphasis on breathing space over brute impact. It’s Private Music at its most expansive and deliberate.

Not every moment hits as hard. “cXz” and “Milk of the Madonna” lean into more straightforward alt-metal riffs—impressive in texture and tone, but the songs themselves sometimes feel skeletal, more like exercises in aesthetic than fully developed compositions. Here, the rhythm section shines: bold drum fills and thunderous bass work hard to keep momentum when the guitars flatten. Still, the sheer physicality of the instrumentation gives even the weaker tracks a sense of presence.

In the final act, Private Music takes some unexpected risks. “Cut Hands” and “~Metal Dream” flirt openly with nu-metal aesthetics—thick, downtuned riffs, swaggering rhythms, and early-2000s attitude reimagined through a modern, more introspective lens. Sometimes it feels like Deftones are playfully toying with their past, other times it risks veering into parody. The result is a back half that’s unpredictable and occasionally uneven, but undeniably bold.

The album closes with “Departing the Body,” a slow-burning elegy built on sparse guitar strums, glacial tempos, and vocals that hover in the low, breathy registers. As the track unfolds, heavy riffs return—not with the towering force of the opener, but with a colder, more introspective resolve. It’s a fitting bookend: where “My Mind Is a Mountain” ascended with weight and fury, “Departing the Body” retreats into stillness, reflecting on the journey rather than escalating it.

In the end, Private Music is an album of contrasts: monumental heaviness and ambient levity, oppressive darkness and airy transcendence, nostalgia and boundary-pushing reinvention. Its strongest moments lie in its hypnotic grooves, layered dynamics, and the scale of its sonic ambition. While a few tracks fall short in structure or clarity, Deftones once again prove that their sound remains fluid—capable of being both brutally heavy and breathtakingly delicate, often in the same breath.

Rating: 8/10