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Throw a rock and five times out of six you’ll hit a band that’ll tell you how distinctive their sound is. Those bands are liars. Not so Deftones, whose elegiac paeans (it’s a contradiction, but it works) to longing ring out loud and true.

The songs come wrapped up in a densely layered mesh of crashing guitars and Chino Moreno’s mournful wail, which is even more endearing when it becomes an unlikely falsetto.

They were once (incorrectly) lumped in with the nu metal scene, but everyone has to start somewhere, and like all the best bands, their evolution (check out 2012’s seismic Koi No Yokan if you want to be knocked sideways) has left a jaw-dropping trail. Abstract and startling, listen to the hefty groove of Prayers/Triangles or the slow blooming Phantom Bride and feel the earth move beneath your feet.

Philip Wilding is a novelist, journalist, scriptwriter, biographer and radio producer. As a young journalist he criss-crossed most of the United States with bands like Motley Crue, Kiss and Poison (think the Almost Famous movie but with more hairspray). More latterly, he’s sat down to chat with bands like the slightly more erudite Manic Street Preachers, Afghan Whigs, Rush and Marillion.