The Kate Bush Trick Just Worked Again
In the second episode of I Will Find You, the Netflix series that premiered June 18, a slow swirl of guitar rises under the scene and a whole generation reaches for Shazam. The song is "Change (In the House of Flies)," and it is 26 years old. Within a month it had pulled 13.8 million on-demand streams in the US, enough to put it at No. 1 on Billboard's Top TV Songs chart for June. For scale: when the song was new in 2000, it peaked at No. 3 on Alternative Airplay, the first top ten Deftones ever scored on any songs ranking. A quarter century later, one television scene did what radio never quite could.
You have seen this movie before. In 2022, Stranger Things season four put Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" under its defining scene and pushed a single from 1985 to No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and to No. 1 in the UK. The Deftones edition is smaller in raw numbers and better as a discovery story, because "Change" corrects a filing error. Casual listeners shelved this band under angry 2000s nu-metal decades ago and never checked again. "Change" is the counter-evidence: slow, humid, more shoegaze than mosh pit, Chino Moreno's voice drifting somewhere between a whisper and a wound. If the song stopped you mid-episode, you did not stumble on a relic. You found the door.
Here is the path through that door. Start with White Pony, the 2000 album "Change" comes from and the place where the angry 2000s label goes to die: it is the band's dreamiest, strangest record, and it still sounds like the future. Then jump straight to last year's private music, their tenth album, which arrived to a 90 on Metacritic, five stars from NME, and a top five placing on the Billboard 200. That is not a legacy act cashing a sync check. That is a band still making some of its best music 26 years after its biggest song. And when you want to hear the needle-drop in context, I Will Find You is sitting right there in the Netflix menu. Heavy, dreamy guitar music is having its best run in years, and this band helped invent the sound everyone is chasing. You are not 26 years late to Deftones. You are exactly on time.
