Deftones marked a career milestone on Sunday, August 23, headlining the Outbreak x All Points East collaboration in Victoria Park—their largest UK headline show to date. The Sacramento art-metal veterans returned to London just months after closing their winter tour at The O2, anchoring a bill that mirrored the band’s eclectic DNA: gothic post-punk from Interpol, ferocious energy from IDLES, genre-defying invention from JPEGMAFIA, and emo heroism from AFI.
Earlier in the day, Interpol drew a massive crowd to the East Stage for a pristine, career-spanning set weighted heavily toward their seminal debut, Turn On the Bright Lights—a favorite of Deftones frontman Chino Moreno. With drummer Sam Fogarino recovering from spinal surgery, Matt Barrick (The Walkmen, MUZZ) filled in seamlessly as Paul Banks and company tore through “Evil,” “Rest My Chemistry,” “The New,” “Slow Hands,” and “PDA.” New tracks “See Out Loud” and “Wings On Fire” hinted at the band’s forthcoming eighth album, due August 28.
Amyl & The Sniffers followed with a fiery, infectious set, frontwoman Amy Taylor using her platform to advocate for women’s safety and a free Palestine while denouncing “the right wing shit” permeating culture and politics. Across the park, IDLES commanded one of the weekend’s largest crowds at the West Stage for their sole London appearance of 2026. Opening with the blistering “Levitator,” Joe Talbot led a headliner-caliber procession through “Never Fight a Man With a Perm,” “Mother,” “Dancer,” “Danny Nedelko,” and “Mr. Motivator,” punctuated by crowd chants of “Free, free Palestine” and a roll call for “any scumbags in the audience” before their adopted anthem, “I’m Scum.” A massive summer looms for the Bristol outfit, with their “most exciting album yet” on the horizon.
By the time Deftones took the East Stage, the 50,000-capacity field was packed to the horizon. A resurgence fueled by TikTok virality—”Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away),” “Sextape,” and “Cherry Waves” finding new generations—has elevated the band to a commercial peak, amplified by the acclaim for their 2025 album Private Music. Notable attendees included Jehnny Beth, Foals drummer Jack Bevan, and actor-musician Paddy Considine, who commemorated the band’s previous UK run with a White Pony tattoo.
Moreno kept banter minimal, letting the music carry the emotional weight. Backed by cinematic visuals sprawled across the festival’s massive screens, Deftones navigated the full spectrum of their arsenal—brutal and tender, seductive and sinister—without a single lull. The viral-era favorites predictably ignited the loudest reactions, yet the crowd matched that fervor for the groove of “Swerve City” and “Rocket Skates,” the pummeling “Milk of the Madonna,” the deranged majesty of “Change (In the House of Flies),” the beloved rarity “Risk,” and a feral encore of old-school staples “Lotion” and “7 Words.”
Deftones played:
‘Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)’
‘Around the Fur’
‘My Mind Is A Mountain’
‘Feiticeira’
‘Swerve City’
‘Mascara’
‘Rocket Skates’
‘Risk’
‘Rosemary’
‘Tempest’
‘Locked Club’
‘Sextape’
‘Infinite Source’
‘Entombed’
‘Xerces’
‘Korea’
‘Change (In the House of Flies)’
‘My Own Summer (Shove It)’
‘Milk Of The Madonna’
Encore:
‘Cherry Waves’
‘Lotion’
‘7 Words’
Reflecting on the band’s unexpected viral resurgence in a conversation with NME last year, Moreno remained characteristically grounded. “Even if we thought about it that way—’Oh, we need to make something for everybody’—I think we’d be fooling ourselves to think we had a formula to do that,” he said. Asked for the secret to their cross-generational endurance, he replied: “The answer is that I don’t know. I would like to think that it is because we’ve written good songs that have stood the test of time and transcend generations.”
Deftones’ summer tour continues with dates in Ireland, Scotland, France, and Portugal, before closing the year at Sick New World in Texas and their own curated Dia De Los Deftones festival. All Points East concludes this weekend with Tyler, the Creator and Twenty One Pilots headlining the final two days.
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