Deftones

White Pony/Black Stallion REPRISE/WARNER

Nu metal pioneers’ acclaimed third album gets a 20th-anniversary spruce up.

To call Deftones the smartest of nu metal’s first wave is damning them with faint praise, given the low bar set by their contemporaries. But the Sacramento band were clever enough to dispense with the genre’s more boneheaded clichés quicker than you could say “For Christ’s sake pull those jeans up.” By the time of their masterful third album, 2000’s White Pony, they had transformed into something entirely different: the Radiohead of metal.

This 20th-anniversary reissue is a reminder of just how great that album was and is. Deftones were swimming in a deeper pool of influences than the likes of Korn and Limp Bizkit, and owed more to The Cure and groundbreaking Sheffield electronic label Warp than it did to Rage Against The Machine and Faith No More. So stubborn in the desire to do something different were the band that the album’s original opener, , didn’t possess anything so conventional as a chorus, instead the ebb and flow of kicking it off.