The walk into Qudos Bank Arena is carried by a clear sense of excitement tonight, the Deftones have returned to Australia after nearly a decade away.
Ecca Vandal opens with a set that refuses to sit still. She moves between punk abrasion, hip-hop cadence and something more fluid without signalling the shifts, her voice snapping one moment and stretching the next. Her set lands with particular force, she’s just played Coachella and there’s a sense that she’s building a world rather than just performing songs, each track adding another layer of colour and volatility.
Interpol follow with something more controlled. Their set leans into that clipped, nocturnal pulse they’ve carried since the early 2000s, guitars interlocking with mechanical clarity while Paul Banks delivers vocals that hover between detachment and urgency.
When Deftones arrive, Chino Moreno bursts onstage in a sharp black suit, cutting a stark silhouette against the opening wash of light. From the first moments, there’s a sense of being submerged and yet emerging at the same time. ‘Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)’ doesn’t just open the set, it pulls the entire arena under.
That feeling deepens as the visuals begin to take hold. During ‘milk of the madonna’, the screens flicker with something both disturbing and strangely hypnotic, you feel helpless like you have to submit rather than resist. It’s spectacular without ever feeling safe.
There is very little banter between songs. ‘Digital Bath’ and ‘Feiticeira’ ebb and flow, while ‘Swerve City’ cuts through with urgency. ‘Around the Fur’ detonates something more physical in the crowd, a circle pit opening up as bodies surge and a stray bottles and items of clothing arc through the air, briefly catching the light before disappearing back into the mass.
There’s a strange dichotomy in the crowd. Most people are dressed in black, goth-like clothing, but pockets of fans react with a kind of unrestrained energy, screaming and throwing themselves into the moment in a way that you’d expect at a pop concert.
The band is tight and focused. Stephen Carpenter anchors the low-end weight, while Abe Cunningham keeps everything fluid, never letting the heaviness calcify. Frank Delgado threads atmosphere through the gaps, giving the set its sense of depth.
During ‘Sextape’, Moreno moves onto guitar, dissolving into the band’s undertow as the visuals open out into vast ocean imagery, slow waves rolling and folding over themselves, the whole room caught in that steady, tidal pull. By ‘Rocket Skates’, all restraint is gone, the mic swinging wildly as he moves across the stage with relentless energy. In the crowd, it mirrors back. A guy near me is wildly playing air guitar and then moves into full air drumming, lost completely in the momentum.
‘Change (In the House of Flies)’ lands like a collective exhale. The arena is bathed in red, thousands of phones lighting up as people scream the lyrics at each other. It’s less about watching now, more about participation, the boundary between performer and audience dissolving. Around this late stretch, the newer material leans further into unease, with ‘departing the body’ accompanied by Lynchian imagery of a woman suspended in water, her state unresolved. Is she alive? Dead? Somewhere in between? It mirrors the sensation in the room, we are all submerged and surfacing at the same time.
What runs through the entire set is a sense of contradiction held in place. The music speaks to decay and evolution at once, something corroding while something else is forming underneath it. The visuals lean into the grotesque, but the response isn’t rejection. It’s submission. You feel a willingness to sit inside it, to let it wash over you rather than push back.
By the time the encore hits, with ‘Cherry Waves’ drifting before ‘My Own Summer (Shove It)’ and ‘7 Words’ close things out, the room feels altered. Not just louder or more chaotic, but recalibrated.
Outside, the air feels thinner again, but inside, for a couple of hours, it felt like total immersion in something rare, the kind of show that pulls you under and leaves you better for it when you come back up.
Images Deb Pelser
