For a band now three decades into its career, Deftones strode into Qudos Bank Arena on Saturday 2 May looking and sounding unnervingly vital.
From the moment Chino Moreno appeared in a sharp black suit and the band plunged into a soaring Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away), the room felt less like a nostalgia trip and more like a band in its prime testing how far its music can still stretch.
Moreno remains the group’s gravitational centre, slipping from a whisper to a serrated scream in a heartbeat, pacing the length of the stage, then dissolving into the band’s undertow on tracks like Sextape. Around him, Abe Cunningham’s fluid drumming, Frank Delgado’s eerie textures and Shaun Lopez’s guitars (standing in for Stephen Carpenter) kept everything tight but never clinical.
The setlist underlined that this is not a museum piece. Yes, the band delivered the essential touchstones that first galvanised the fanbase: Around the Fur detonated a physical surge in the stands, Change (In the House of Flies) became a mass singalong, and the encore run of Cherry Waves, My Own Summer (Shove It) and Hole in the Earth sent everyone out hoarse. But those classics sat comfortably alongside deep cuts and fresh material, as the band moved through songs from almost every era: the humid drift of Digital Bath, the punch of Diamond Eyes, and a clutch of tracks from this year’s much-adored new album, including Milk of the Madonna, My Mind Is a Mountain, Infinite Source and the live-debuted Departing the Body.
What makes nights like this remarkable is how rare this model has become. In an age where the cultural conversation has shifted towards solo pop stars, short-form content and algorithm-friendly singles, rock bands that can still fill arenas on the strength of a decades-long catalogue are increasingly uncommon.
Many of Deftones’ peers from the late 90s and early 2000s now tour almost exclusively on 20- or 30-year anniversary laps of the one album that made them; the hook is memory, not momentum. Deftones, by contrast, are a living, evolving proposition: still producing adventurous, critically acclaimed records that justify tours in their own right, while being smart enough to honour the songs that built their following in the first place.
Saturday’s show in Sydney captured exactly why the band has not only endured but quietly grown, seducing a new generation without losing the old guard. The crowd skewed surprisingly young, proof that these songs now belong to more than one era, and that the band’s blend of beauty and brutality still feels contemporary rather than retro.
With this Australia and New Zealand run rolling on through Brisbane and beyond, Deftones are making a strong case that in a time when bands are supposed to be fading out, some can still sell out stadiums on the strength of the present tense.
