Moreno admits booze once eased his nerves but left him sloppy, a discovery made after watching old concert footage that looked less like art and more like karaoke at last call. Enter Alice In Chains’ Mike Inez, part-time bassist, full-time sobriety coach, who encouraged Chino to ditch the bottle.

The result? A leaner, sharper performer who bounds across the stage like a caffeinated housecat. Drummer Abe Cunningham swears his bandmate has never been this focused, or this feline.

The lifestyle upgrade bleeds into Private Music, Deftones’ tenth album and a genre-melting monster that manages to be both brutal and beautiful. Opening with My Mind Is A Mountain, the record plunges listeners into a hurricane of riffs before drifting into the woozy tenderness of Infinite Source. Just when you think it’s safe, Milk of the Madonna pelts you with bloody rain, proving that sobriety hasn’t dulled Moreno’s taste for Biblical mayhem.

Even the so-called _love song_, I Think About You All the Time, arrives drowned in shoegaze melancholy and guitar thunder. The album ends with Departing the Body, a track that begins like a lullaby and finishes like an asteroid strike.