DEFTONES: White Pony Vinyl LP

The album that broke Deftones out of every box they'd been put in.

White Pony (2000) is the Sacramento band's third album and the record where Chino Moreno, Stephen Carpenter, Chi Cheng, Abe Cunningham, and Frank Delgado stopped being a nu-metal band and became something harder to classify. Recorded over four months at The Plant in Sausalito with producer Terry Date, it pulls in shoegaze, trip-hop, post-rock, and dream pop without losing the low-end weight that makes it hit. Elite won the Grammy for Best Metal Performance. Passenger features Maynard James Keenan. Change (In the House of Flies) became one of the defining slow-burn songs of the era. The band reportedly hated the label's insistence on adding Back to School (Mini Maggit) to later pressings -- the original 11-track sequence is the one to hear. A 2xLP on vinyl.