HEAVY WEATHER.

In the late eighties, two teen-age skateboarders, Camilo (Chino) Moreno and Stephen Carpenter, met in Sacramento and began talking about music. Carpenter, who liked aggressive heavy metal, had been hit by a drunk driver while skateboarding and had bought an elaborate guitar rig with money he won as a settlement. Moreno was a fan of the morose British band Depeche Mode and the Washington, D.C., hard-core punk pioneer Bad Brains. Eventually, he joined Carpenter's new band, Deftones, as the lead singer. (The name is a pun on "def," a term of approbation in hip-hop, and "tone deaf.")

When Deftones' first album, "Adrenaline," was released, in 1995, the group was described as part of an emerging genre called "nu metal," which also included the bands Korn (with whom Deftones toured), Limp Bizkit, and, several years later, the extremely popular Linkin Park. These groups took pride in playing well and shared a fondness for expensive equipment and the distorted guitar sounds of eighties metal bands like Metallica and Slayer. They also tended to equate music-making with catharsis, whether their lyrics dealt with child abuse (Korn), bitterness (Limp Bizkit), or cryptic epiphanies about life and death (Deftones).

Deftones are as loud and aggressive as any other nu-metal band, but stranger. Much of their music is built from resonant, glowing major chords, but the band rarely creates beauty without sabotaging it. Within a single song, the music will shift from invitingly soft harmonic passages--say, Moreno's delicate moaning layered over Carpenter's cloudy guitar--to clipped, repetitive motifs punctuated by hoarse barking and shrieking. (Moreno's lyrics, when you can discern them through the fantastic din, are oblique. The words to what seems to be the chorus of "Street Carp," one of the band's loveliest and most acoustically punishing songs, are "Well, here's my new address: 664 . . . oh, I forget. There's your evidence; now take it home and run with it.") The only predictable element in a Deftones song is the precise drumming of Abe Cunningham, a powerful musician who provides a sense of order. One of the chief pleasures of listening to the music is the suspense it creates: in every song, there is the imminent possibility that chaos will get the upper hand.

In 2003, I listened almost daily to "Minerva," from "Deftones," the band's fourth album. It begins with Moreno playing a high, tentative phrase on his guitar. This figure is then obliterated by what could be one, two, or fifteen chords--the space between notes has become imperceptible. The music is distorted in such a way that you can hear many harmonic overtones on top of the original notes. It's a lot for the ears to process, like the sound of seven people talking on a party line. A minute or so later, the chords change, and Moreno sings an intelligible line: "And God bless you all, for the song you saved us." It's as if he were talking to the song itself, thanking all the notes whizzing around him.

Listening to "Minerva," or to any of Deftones' best songs, is a bit like driving through a snowstorm: you lose your bearings, and it's both scary and delightful. (One day, I was playing "Minerva" on my headphones while walking in SoHo and failed to notice a small crane swinging a load of Sheetrock across the sidewalk. I felt a wind at my back and turned to see several thousand pounds of plaster sail into a doorway, inches from my head. Deftones had blocked out the world.) The band's ability to overwhelm the senses makes its music satisfying, but that may also be what prevents the group from scoring hits. In 1999, the video for "Change (In the House of Flies)" was played constantly on MTV, but none of the band's singles have entered the Billboard Hot ...