Conceived by Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan and guitarist Billy Howerdel in Los Angeles in 1999, A Perfect Circle channels art-rock ambition through a darker, more melodic lens than Keenan's primary band. Their debut 'Mer de Noms' became the highest-charting debut for a rock band at the time, followed by the politically charged 'Thirteenth Step' and 'Eat the Elephant.' The project represents Keenan's more introspective and emotionally vulnerable side, wrapped in Howerdel's lush, cinematic guitar work.

Deftones formed in Sacramento in 1988 and became one of heavy music's most adaptable bands by treating atmosphere as seriously as impact. Adrenaline and Around the Fur tied them to the first wave of nu metal through downtuned riffs, volatile dynamics, and Chino Moreno's shifts between whisper, melody, and scream, but White Pony expanded the vocabulary into trip-hop haze, shoegaze texture, art rock, and sensual unease. Stephen Carpenter's guitar style often works through weight and repetition rather than traditional riff complexity, while Abe Cunningham's drumming gives the songs a loose, human push that separates the band from more rigid alternative metal. Deftones' later catalog, from Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan to Ohms and Private Music, kept refining the balance between heaviness, dreamlike ambience, and emotional ambiguity. They are metal-adjacent in a distinctive way: the crushing parts matter, but so do negative space, vocal intimacy, bass pressure, and the feeling that beauty and threat are occupying the same room. That tension is their enduring signature across decades of changing heavy music.