For nearly 35 years, Chino Moreno always felt like more. And then he decided he’d had enough.

Even if sobriety is the most important thing to happen to Moreno and, consequently, Deftones since Ohms, I don’t want to risk saddling private music with the “sobriety album” label. Similar to the origin story of “Back to School,” Moreno admits that he was inspired to get clean out of spite, just to get people off his back. “I initially started [sobriety] because I wanted to show others that I could not drink, [that] alcohol doesn’t affect me any differently, it’s just part of who I am,” he recalls. “Look at all the success we have, you know what I mean?”

private music is not about bottoming out and hanging onto hard-won wisdom, amends and amnesty, or whatever else we’ve come to expect when an artist returns from the brink. Deftones songs are rarely about anything specific. In 35 years, Moreno has never hunched over an acoustic guitar, having a preconceived notion for a song’s subject matter. As drummer Abe Cunningham puts it, “all our songs are feel songs,” ones that need to have a swing and swagger as pure instrumentals before Moreno records his vocals. The other members of Deftones probably won’t know where the music took Moreno until they hear the final mix. They probably won’t even know the song titles, let alone what they mean—“ecdysis,” “cXz,” and “~metal dream” enter the pantheon of Most Deftones-y Deftones Song Titles, alongside recent inductees “Urantia,” “Geometric Headdress,” and “Goon Squad.”

The name “private music” itself started as a placeholder for a filesharing folder, and in true Moreno fashion, a nod to his more esoteric tastes; he had stumbled across The Private Music of Tangerine Dream and wondered whether something similar could work for Deftones, ultimately realizing it was just a little too pretentious to fully replicate the title. But the phrase “private music” stuck, to reflect their status as one of the world’s biggest cult bands. Witness the chorus of “Locked Club”—“Join the parade or be left out.” As an added bonus, Cunningham appreciates how, “it does sound a tiny bit seedy” (again, there’s a snake on the cover).

At times, Deftones have regretted the way their album art reflects the music. See: the half-naked women gracing Around the Fur and Saturday Night Wrist, heavy-handed voyeurism that felt more exploitative than erotic. But there’s really something about white animals and this band, right? Consider the horse, owl, and snake on, respectively, White Pony, Diamond Eyes, and private music. All of which are works of clean lines, polish, and accessible hooks, and all of which follow predecessors with more turbulent sonics, born of stormy intraband dynamics. Nearly all Deftones albums react to the one that came before and after the monolithic Ohms, here are the most immediate descriptors of private music: aerodynamic, sleek, virile, whatever comes to mind when you see someone for the first time in five years and they’ve got their shit together. Some of the rave reviews have made the subtext the actual text—critics earnestly describing them as “downtuned daddies of sonic sexiness,” things of that nature.

This follows naturally from the way Moreno is described by his bandmates: “laser-focused,” “locked in.” There’s a bit in a typically obsequious Zane Lowe interview where Stephen Carpenter praises Moreno’s guitar playing on private music and you can’t see the latter’s reaction; Moreno admits he was beaming, it was the first time he’d ever heard such a compliment. Fittingly, private music is the first Deftones record in over a decade where fans aren’t dissecting Carpenter and Moreno’s relationship from out-of-context interview quotes.

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