Four members of Deftones were crammed into an apartment in south Seattle, writing and recording their second album in a studio owned by Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam. The studio was Studio Litho, and the band had it because Pearl Jam were busy elsewhere making their fifth record, Yield. On October 28, 1997, the result — Around the Fur — came out on Maverick Records, and it would change how heavy music sounded at the end of the decade.
The question hanging over the album was not the music but the photograph on the front. Deftones had asked photographer Rick Kosick to shoot a night party in Seattle, and one image showed a woman named Lisa M. Hughes, a friend of guitarist Stephen Carpenter. The band liked the shot enough to use it, but nobody had secured her permission. They had to find her afterward to clear the cover for release.
The cover the band disliked
Chino Moreno, the singer, never warmed to it. He called the cover terrible, and one reason he gave was the hint of marital infidelity involving married members of the band. The image was not staged as a glamour shot; it came from a real party, with a real person who only spoke publicly about the cover in 2017, on the album's twentieth anniversary. The band's discomfort stayed private for years while the record sold.
He called the cover terrible, and one reason he gave was the hint of marital infidelity involving married members of the band.
The music had its own strange edges. For Headup, Deftones wrote with Max Cavalera, the Brazilian vocalist then moving from Sepultura to Soulfly, and he sang on the track. Drummer Abe Cunningham experimented with different snare drums on almost every song. Frank Delgado, still credited as an additional musician for sound effects, would not become an official member until 1999.
Hidden tracks and vinyl cuts
On CD and digital editions, the album hid a secret. Between the final listed track MX and the bonus track Damone, listeners who let the disc keep playing found Bong Hit — a voicemail recording of the band smoking through a bong. Vinyl editions dropped both hidden tracks, ending cleanly after MX. The full digital version runs well over an hour, a sprawling document of a band refusing to behave.
The commercial response was immediate without being explosive. In its first week, the record moved 43,000 copies and landed at number 29 on the Billboard 200, a position it never surpassed. It stayed on that chart for 17 weeks. Gold certification arrived on June 24, 1999, and platinum followed in 2011 — proof that the record kept finding new listeners long after the initial wave. The album's reputation only grew with time. In 2018, readers of Revolver placed it fifth among the greatest nu-metal albums ever made, and a year earlier Loudwire had ranked it the third best hard rock record of 1997. Those lists confirmed what fans already knew: Around the Fur had outlasted most of its contemporaries.
Critics took notice early. The album won Best Album at the Kerrang! Awards in 1998, and Metal Hammer placed it among the ten best records of 1997. Years later, Chino Moreno said Around the Fur was his favorite Deftones album. The band had made a record in someone else's studio, with a cover they argued about and a hidden track they never advertised, and it became the one they could not outgrow. The band also carried the album across stages on both sides of the Atlantic. After its release, Deftones toured North America and Europe with Far and Will Haven, then spent 1998 playing festivals like Warped Tour, Pinkpop, Roskilde, and Ozzfest. That same year they released a live EP, capturing the energy of a group that had become a relentless touring machine.