In an interview with Rock Feed, Deftones guitarist Stephen Carpenter shared his thoughts on being labeled as nu-metal and how he felt about it back in the day.
The guitarist said he found the term weird: “At the time, for me, having grown up with the Big Four and just metal being born in general, to me, the term was kind of weird, because I was like, ‘Well, it’s just metal.’”
“It just happened to be the latest version of it, but we’re just doing metal,” he added. “I’ve always understood why the term was there, but I didn’t have a greater appreciation for it until it was over.”
Since the beginning of their career, Deftones have been labeled as nu-metal and have been put in the same category that Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, and Korn belonged to. The frontman Chino Moreno however, wasn’t happy with the term when it first came out and that Deftones was labeled under it.
“A lot of the press obviously put us in the category and our first instinct was just to kind of push it away. When they called it nu metal for one, I was like, ‘Well if it’s new you’re calling it you’re putting the word new in it, it’s gonna be old like in a couple of years,’” the frontman said during an interview with BangerTV. “Then again, you look at these other bands. There are some great bands I guess in that movement or whatever it was, but each to each with his own.”
He added, “I always felt like we were our own kind of thing and we weren’t put together under any kind of frequency thoughts of what we were going to be. We just are who we are, so I wanted to be Deftones. I don’t want to be a part of all this other thing.”
In other news, Deftones has announced their fifth annual ‘Dia De Los Deftones Festival’ at San Diego’s Petco Park on Saturday, November 2. The one-day event will feature Idles, Sunny Day Real Estate, Health, Paris Texas, and Duster. Also on the lineup are Gel and Qendresa.
You can watch the recent interview down below.