White Pony is the third studio album by the American alternative metal<!--by convention here, Deftones' main genre is alternative metal, before changing it, there must be consensus on the talk page.--> band Deftones, released on June 20, 2000, through Maverick Records. It was produced by Terry Date, who produced the band's first two albums, Adrenaline (1995) and Around the Fur (1997). Recording sessions took place at The Plant Recording Studios in Sausalito, California, with additional recording at Larrabee Sound Studios in West Hollywood.
The album marked a significant growth in the band's sound, incorporating influences from post-hardcore, trip hop, shoegaze, progressive rock, and post-rock into the alternative metal sound which they had become known for. White Pony was also the first recording to feature Frank Delgado as a full-time member of the band on turntables and synthesizer; Delgado had previously worked with the band as a featured guest on their first two albums, producing sound effects on some songs. It was also the first Deftones album on which Chino Moreno began to contribute rhythm guitar parts.
Upon its release and retrospectively, the album received generally positive reviews, and was regarded by fans and critics alike as one of the band's most mature outings at that point. The album includes two successful singles ("Change (In the House of Flies)" and "Back to School (Mini Maggit)"), the promotional single "Digital Bath", as well as the 2001 Grammy Award–winning track for Best Metal Performance, "Elite". The album received a 20th anniversary reissue, packaged with Black Stallion, a companion remix album of White Pony, in December 2020.
Background and recording
After a break from touring, the band spent four months in the studio writing and recording White Pony with the producer Terry Date, the longest amount of time they had dedicated to an album thus far. The singer Chino Moreno explained that the majority of this time was spent trying to write songs, and that the writing of "Change (In the House of Flies)" was the turning point where the band began working as a unit.
Although the band initially did not intend to include guest musicians on the album, with the layered atmospherics of the Cure, specifically their Pornography era. It has also been categorized as an art rock Metal Hammer likened the album to a metal version of Radiohead's critically acclaimed OK Computer (1997).
Lyrically, much of the album centers around "sex and violence", which Moreno considered "a big part of fucking rock 'n' roll"; he attributed some of that to the band's drug use at the time Moreno said that the song "is laughing at everybody trying to become what they already are. If you want to be one of the elite, you are". The title is a reference to a line in the Dr. Dooom song "No Chorus" on the album First Come, First Served which mocks Nas. but later declared that he regretted the creation of the song and its placement on the album.
Release
Upon release, White Pony debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 below Britney Spears' Oops!... I Did It Again and Eminem's The Marshall Mathers LP, selling 178,000 copies in its first week. It is Deftones' highest-selling album to date, being certified 2× platinum by the RIAA on July 3, 2025.
In honor of the album's 20th anniversary, Deftones re-released White Pony on December 11, 2020, packaged with Black Stallion, a bonus remix album.
| rev1 = AllMusic
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| rev3 = Kerrang!
| rev3Score = 5/5
| rev4 = Los Angeles Times
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| rev5 = Melody Maker
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| rev6 = NME
| rev6Score = 8/10
| rev7 = Pitchfork
| rev7Score = 8.4/10
| rev8 = Rolling Stone
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| rev9 = Spin
| rev9Score = 4/10
| rev10=The Village Voice
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White Pony was generally well received by critics upon its release, garnering an aggregate rating of 72/100 on Metacritic based on 15 reviews. Several reviewers praised Moreno's increasing lyrical sophistication and the group's sonic experimentation. Similarly, BBC Music praised the album while opining: "[The fact] that such a progressive, risk-taking LP wasn't celebrated across the board for its gutsy reinventing of a band thought pigeonholed wasn't that surprising, though – this is a difficult album." In a favorable review, Alternative Press noted the album's "art-rock explorations." Publications such as Rolling Stone and Q were somewhat less enthusiastic. The former lamented that the album was overproduced to sound too much like their influencers,
In 2016, Jonathan Dick of NPR Music retrospectively praised the album as a watershed moment or turning point, not only in regards to the Deftones' sound but also, more generally, to heavy and experimental music in the new millennium, describing the album as signaling "not only a change for the band but a new trajectory for heavy and experimental music entering the 21st century". Dick especially noted the album's "shift into the heavy post-rock, shoegaze spectrum" and contended that, within the span of five years from the band's debut album to the release of White Pony, Deftones had distinguished itself as a band "whose sound no longer fit too comfortably under any genre-specific title". Pitchfork retrospectively noted that White Pony "transcended the dubious genre [of nu-metal] by fashioning a truly new form from post-hardcore, industrial, trip-hop, shoegaze, ambient electronics, and synth-pop." In 2017, Rolling Stone ranked White Pony as 66th on their list of 'The 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time.' In 2019, The Guardian ranked it 29th on their list of 'The 100 best albums of the 21st century'. Also in 2019, Rae Lemeshow-Barooshian of Loudwire included the album on her list of "the top 50 nu-metal albums of all time", ranking it fifth. In 2020, it was named one of the 20 best metal albums of 2000 by Metal Hammer magazine.
The album's third track, "Elite", won the Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance in 2001. The Deftones drummer Abe Cunningham commented on the awards night: "All the people were on the ground, on the floor, and we were up sort of in the balcony, we were like, 'We're not gonna win. Look where we're sitting.' Everybody else who was winning, they'd get up there quick and get back. So we were just watching it and the whole thing was rad, just seeing the (stuff) go down. And all of a sudden they called our name. We just jumped over this balcony down onto the floor and ran up there. It was pretty cool, man".
The album won the 2000 Kerrang! Award for Album of the Year.
At the 2001 California Music Awards, it won Outstanding Hard Rock/Heavy Metal Album.
Track listing
| length7 = 4:49
| title8 = Korea
| length8 = 3:23
| title9 = Passenger
| length9 = 6:07
| note9 = featuring Maynard James Keenan
| title10 = Change (In the House of Flies)
| length10 = 4:59
| title11 = Pink Maggit
| length11 = 7:32
| total_length = 48:43