It's the day of the Deftones' first live show in nearly a year, and the members of the Sacramento
 rap-metal band are atternpting to calm their nerves at a local bar and grill. Even though they 
have chosen a small Petaluma club to play a handful of warm-up dates before hitting the major 
arena and festival circuit later this summer (they're due at the Warfield on August 8), the size 
and hinterland location of tonight's show hardly eases the tension.

Front man Chino Moreno talks about the butterflies eating away at his stomach. Drummer Abe 
Cunningham stares blankly into space, while DJ Frank Delgado quietly picks at his food. Guitarist 
Stephen Carpenter suddenly focuses on the band's only truly unruffled member, dreadlocked bassist 
Chi Cheng. "Homeboy is tripping," Carpenter says. "But don't give him no whiskey. When he's 
sober, nice guy Chi is hanging. When he's drunk, forget it. He is like the absolute opposite. 
Once his eyes start getting googly, then you know it's on. He'll stare at you for 10 minutes like
 you did something wrong."

"My old lady says when I get drunk I look mad, even if I'm not mad," Cheng says. "I don't try to 
fight anybody or nothing like that. The thing is, when I drink, people go, 'F---, you're real 
drunk. And I go, 'I know.' Then the next day they're like, 'You were so f--ing drunk last night.
 'I'm like,'I know.'It's not like I say anything mean to anybody."
"You are mean when youre drunk," Carpenter says. There is subdued laughter all around the table.
The Deftones have a new album, "White Pony," out Tuesday, which many chartwatchers expect will 
launch the band into the same new-metal stratosphere as contemporaries such as Korn and Limp 
Bizkit. The follow-up to 1997's gold "Around the Fur," however, may throw some fans for a loop. 
Instead of amplifying the bone-ctunching sound of past hits such as "Be Quiet and Drive (Far 
Away)" and "My Own Summer (Shove It);' the band eases into more experimental ground on its latest 
CD. This certainly has something to do with the anxiety over tonight's show. "I don't think this 
record is going to do it for us," Moreno says. 'We could easily have made a record that's more 
along, the lines of what our first record (1995's "Adrenaline") was like, which is what I hear on
 the radio all day. We could have put out another rap-oriented record just because radio is, 
playing that, but we decided we want to keep on pioneering in a certain direction, sort of left 
field from everything around us." Delgado nods. "We wrote this record with no singles in mind," 
he says. "We just wanted to make a record that was good from song one to the end. I think we 
accomplished it. But wyou have to listen to the whole album. If you just played one song for 
someone, you couldnt say this is what the album sounds like. I love that about it."
White Pony is so imaginitive, so smart and captivating that its practically worth the commerial 
risk. Soaring melodies and despondent sythesizers balance out the outbursts of distorted guitars
 and maniacal rhythms. Moreno is singing not screaming. When he sings "Tonight...I feel like 
more" on "Digital Bath" you believe him. "Its actually a pretty heavy record," Moreno says. "But
 its not just heavy, senseless angry music with chunky riffs in it."
"It's not like I'm going through this painful time in my life and need to vent. It's more 
emotionally heavy." Still, "White Pony" has its dubious modern rock mornents, such as when Moreno
 sings, "I look at the cross, then I look away/ Give you the gun, blow me away" on the album's
 first single, "Change (in a House of Flies)." The Deftones got together in Sacramento in the 
early '90s, sharing an incongruous but mutual love of bands such as Slayer, the Cure and Bad 
Brains. At the beginning, there was no plan for world domination. "Sacramento is not one of those
 towns where everybody is trying to blow up," Cheng says. "We were just happy to be in a band and
 have a good time and hopefully score some free beer at the shows. Stephen was the only guy that 
said, 'We're going to get signed to Madonna's label."'
The band signed to Maverick after solidifying its reputation throughout the Central Valley and 
Bay Area. Still, expectations were not great. "I didn't even care if our records sold anything,"
 Moreno says. "I was just happy that we got the chance to make a record with (Soundgarden 
producer) Terry Date in a big studio on a big record label. I was a little worried, but we never
 wanted to be huge. It just kind of happened." Now the band is at a critical juncture. With the 
most luminous album of its career ready to hit stores and expectations raised impossibly high, 
the musicians are staying remarkably grounded.
'It's been such a long process," Moreno says. "There hasn't been one day where we've woken up and
 thought, 'Damn!' It's all built up to where it's at now. I think this record is still 
challenging. I don't think it's a record that you put on right away and get, especially if you're
 into it for aggression. I thought our last record was going to separate us from everything else,
 but when it came out, people weren't ready for it. To this day, people are just discovering that record."