DeftonesA red hue bathed fans from the stage as Ecca Vandal took her place in the spotlight. Punters were given a shock to the system, courtesy of a loud-as-fuck bass drum that reverberated across the arena floor and up into their chests, establishing a fittingly heavy tone for the evening.
Vandal’s prolific genre-blending skills were in full effect. Punk-centric tracks like the unreleased EYES SHUT are juxtaposed with the more hip-hop-influenced THEN THERE’S ONE, giving a small sample of her versatility. Vandal then commanded the pit to open up for her absolute belter of a song, CRUISING TO SELF SOOTHE, a popular track recently heard during her highly regarded performance at Coachella.
It was a frenetic pace that she effortlessly kept up for the entire duration of her set. It’s clear why she was handpicked to perform at last year's Dia De Los Deftones festival, and now finds herself touring with the same band for the Australian leg of their tour.
A talent who knows how to maximise her minutes, Ecca Vandal pulled off the rock music equivalent of a perfect tight five, letting Sydney know she’s one to keep an eye on, especially with her new album, LOOKING FOR PEOPLE TO UNFOLLOW, being scheduled to drop later this month.
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Sandwiched between two heavy hitters, indie-rock royalty Interpol acted as a nice interlude from the potentially eardrum-breaking noise that would characterise the night. Despite playing the support role for this tour, it was still an unusual sight seeing fans file into the venue while a band as popular as Interpol were deep into their set opener, All The Rage Back Home.
With no backdrop lighting, the band spent most of their time on stage as silhouettes. Further adding to the low-energy nature of their performance was Paul Banks’ vocals, which occasionally got muddled in the mix (but otherwise sounded great). The most punters might have seen of the band could have been when blue lighting spread across the stage as Interpol performed the unreleased track Wings On Fire, said to be a taste from their future album.
If you were an Interpol fan, you were absolutely being catered to with their setlist. The chugging bass of Evil still sounded like the absolute earworm it’s remembered for being. The guitar tone for the angst-ridden Obstacle 1 sounded like it was straight off the album. They kept the hits coming non-stop, finishing with the two-punch combo of PDA and NYC, the latter of which saw guitarist Daniel Kessler expertly tremolo-pick as rapidly as the bright white lights in front of the band flashed out to the audience, to an almost blinding degree.
Overall, it made for a good appetiser for the predominantly Deftones-heavy crowd. They weren’t overstimulated or exhausted before the main course, just nicely entertained.
By this point, the anticipation was palpable at the Qudos Bank Arena. The sold-out crowd was just waiting to explode, and that’s exactly what they did once Be Quiet, and Drive (Far Away) got going. The iconic opening guitar strums rang out, and the anticipation built. All this tension led to a perfect release when the drums finally kicked in, and the crowd lost their collective minds as lead singer Chino Moreno bolted left and right across the stage like a madman. Simply put, it was the perfect set opener. Deftones had finally arrived.
The mighty wall of sound this opening track created lasted pretty much the whole show. Sure, there were brief moments of reprieve and levity, like the lone guitar riff from fan favourite Sextape or Moreno’s haunting vocals echoing out during departing the body, but all these moments were in service of a much bigger, louder sound that had loyalists in the mosh pit spinning around in circles all night long.
In so many ways, the whole night was a celebration of the blending of old and new. While some might assume a mostly older demographic for this show, these beloved nu-metal icons from the late ‘90s were also being strongly supported by a whole new generation of fans, many of whom were so young they required chaperones. This longevity of popularity, thanks to longtime and brand-new fans alike, made for an interestingly diverse crowd. Although the one thing they all had in common was, of course, the all-black clothing.
Much like the support acts, Moreno and company didn’t waste much time talking in between tracks, opting to maximise their output and successfully fitting over 20 tracks into a tight 90 minutes. The energy was so intense, from both the band and the crowd, that anyone would have had a hard time distinguishing the new songs from the old. The vibes were so strong and the music so constantly raucous that there were simply no low points in the evening. Again, this blending of old and new was celebrated as a singular whole, allowing songs from their 2025 release, private music, to get the same level of attention as earlier hits from decades past.
Anyone with a taste for the visually bizarre got a stomach full watching snippets from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s avant-garde film The Holy Mountain, amongst other absurd footage throughout Deftones’ set. The overall stage presentation definitely felt like a big production show, with a variety of different lighting and visual styles throughout.
While they would eventually wrap up their show with 7 Words, a number from their 1995 record Adrenaline, it was actually their penultimate song of the night, the timeless, incendiary banger My Own Summer (Shove It), that served to properly cap things off, pushing the stamina of the audience to its limit one last time as they revelled in tumultuous euphoria.
