There are records you love, and there are records that redefine what a genre can be. White Pony (2000) belongs to the second kind. Deftones’ third album, it is the moment the band frees itself for good from the nu-metal label to invent a music of its own: heavy and airy, brutal and sensual, as indebted to My Bloody Valentine or Depeche Mode as to Slayer.
Everything here lands with startling precision. « Digital Bath » suspends time; « Change (In the House of Flies) » gives the band its biggest hit without disowning any of its strangeness; « Passenger », a duet with Maynard James Keenan, reaches an almost unbearable intensity; « Knife Prty » and « Elite » (which earned a Grammy) remind you fury is never far. Frank Delgado, on samples and textures, becomes a full member here, his work bathing the whole record in an electronic halo.
Twenty-five years on, White Pony sits on every list of the century’s best metal albums, and its influence is incalculable. It is the peak of a band at the peak of its art, one of those rare records without a single dead moment.
Verdict: 9.5. An absolute classic, unsurpassed in the band’s discography and rare in the genre’s. Essential.
