DEFTONES’ Early 2000s Rift With Korn and Limp Bizkit Resurfaces in Newly Republished “White Pony” Interview

Tensions between Deftones, Korn, and Limp Bizkit in the early 2000s have resurfaced thanks to a newly republished Guitar World interview with Deftones guitarist Stephen Carpenter, conducted around the release of their 2000 landmark album “White Pony.”

While much has been said about Deftones’ decision to distance themselves from the nü-metal movement, this rediscovered interview offers a firsthand look at the frustration that fueled that choice. Carpenter was open about the band’s desire to move beyond the confines of the genre that had propelled them to fame alongside their peers.

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In the interview, Carpenter discussed his transition to 7-string guitars, but took issue with the notion that Deftones were following in Korn’s footsteps. He credited Meshuggah and Fear Factory for influencing his shift toward extended-range instruments, then added:

“Everyone acts like Korn were the first 7-string players, but what about all of those death metallers? I could write some Korn songs easily, and there’s not one I really like.

Okay, we know them, they’re our friends, but they’re still living off the hype of that first record. And as for Fred (Durst, Limp Bizkit), no matter what anyone says, he completely ripped Chino off. Reality is reality.”

At the time, Carpenter’s comments raised eyebrows, especially since Deftones, Korn, and Limp Bizkit had previously toured together and appeared on each other’s albums.

Years later, frontman Chino Moreno took a more diplomatic tone when reflecting on that era. Speaking with ‘Metal Evolution’ in 2017, he said:

“A lot of the press wanted us to—you know obviously they put us in the category [of nü metal.] Our first instinct was just to kind of push it away ’cause you know to me when they called it nü metal for one, I was like well if it’s nü, you’re putting the word new in it, it’s gonna be old in a couple years.

And then again it’s hard for us to get… You look at these other bands and there’s some great bands in that movement—or whatever it was. But to each was his own. I always felt like we were our own kind of thing and we weren’t put together under any kind of preconceived thoughts of what we were gonna be. We just are who we are, so I wanted to be Deftones. I didn’t want to be a part of this other thing.”

Moreno also revealed that Deftones made a deliberate effort to avoid touring with acts commonly associated with the nü-metal label.

“I used to hate it, you know? I think people were gonna do it anyways. But yeah, I used to… We did a lot you know? And I think we hurt a lot of feelings in the meantime, because we turned down so much stuff with Korn and Limp Bizkit at the time—I don’t think a lot of people knew that.

They’re our friends obviously, we’ve known them for a lot of years. And they’d ask us like ‘Hey, you wanna go on tour?’ and we’d be like ‘Nah…’. And it wasn’t because we thought we were better, but we wanted to… Especially, for instance when our record first came out, ‘Adrenaline’ came out, Korn’s first record was already out for like a year I think.

So, people were calling us like ‘baby Korn’ when we first came out and I was boggled by that, you know what I mean? And right away that just made me want to separate myself even from them more. It was kind of tough back then. Now I don’t really care, whatever.”

In another 2017 conversation with Metal Hammer, Moreno recalled how that separation strained relations between the two bands.

“We did make a very conscious choice of who we were going to play shows with. It was hard to be this young band and having to turn down tours. I can’t remember how many times I turned down Korn! And they got pissed at us. Jonathan would say, ‘Why do you hate us?’ and I didn’t know what to say.

I’d tell him, ‘Dude, I don’t hate you. I love you guys, you’re my friends. But I don’t want to tour with you. I don’t want to be on the Family Values with you and Limp Bizkit.’ The name of the genre was nü metal, so anything that is new is one day going to be old. And I didn’t want to be old with it.”

The tension between Deftones and Korn lingered for years. In 2018, Korn guitarist Brian “Head” Welch told ‘Good Company’:

“Chino, Chino don’t like Korn or any of us man. He won’t tour with Korn ’cause we’re not cool enough for him.

I think they [Deftones] got too cool for us somewhere down the line. No but, he just said some stuff recently in the press and it got out there that [he wouldn’t tour with Korn] and then all these fans hit him and said [Welch made an angry expression] so the next day he was like ‘I love Korn, I want to tour with them next year.’”

In that same period, Moreno addressed the perception that Deftones had intentionally distanced themselves out of ego, saying:

“[We] sort of made a conscious decision to try to break away from what we were trying to be shut into—not that we felt better than Korn and Limp Bizkit or any of the other bands. But we just wanted our own identity. One way of helping that was to do shows on our own and away from what we were being lumped into, so that’s all. It’s just funny how blown out of proportion people get. I would do shows with them, I would definitely do shows with them.”

Despite both bands sharing management in later years, a joint Deftones/Korn tour has yet to happen. That may be intentional — as Moreno told Metal Hammer earlier this year, Deftones have consciously avoided associating with the current nü-metal revival:

“It’s so funny, because we tried hard not to be lumped in with nü-metal when nü-metal was big, and then we kind of had to do it again with the nü-metal resurgence – like, hoping that we weren’t going to get lumped in once again. I think we do at times, but we didn’t want to be dated back then, and the musical choices we made were not going to pigeonhole us into that space and time.”

Now standing as arena headliners and genre pioneers, Deftones’ choice to carve their own path away from nü-metal’s mainstream identity has long since paid off — even if it came with growing pains, misunderstandings, and the occasional grudge along the way.

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