Deftones pulled one of their deepest cuts back into the spotlight at Coachella 2024, surprising the crowd with a live cover of The Smiths’ “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want.” The song has long lived in the band’s orbit on record, but this performance marked a major live rarity, with Metal Injection reporting it as the first time Deftones had ever played the cover onstage.
The moment landed during a 12-song Coachella set that was already built to make noise. Deftones opened with “Genesis,” “Rocket Skates,” “Tempest,” and “Swerve City,” then moved through “Digital Bath,” “Feiticeira,” “Ohms,” and “Combat,” which Consequence noted was played live for the first time since 2011. The Smiths cover arrived later in the set, right before “My Own Summer (Shove It),” giving the performance a dramatic and slightly unexpected emotional pivot.
The choice of song made sense for a band like Deftones, who have always balanced heaviness with atmosphere and vulnerability. Their version of “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” first appeared on the B-side of “7 Words” and later surfaced on B-Sides & Rarities in 2005, so the song had already been part of the band’s recorded history for years before it finally reached the stage.
For longtime fans, the cover was more than a novelty. It reminded people that Deftones have never been a band that treats genre boundaries as fixed lines. Dropping a Smiths song into a Coachella set full of crushing riffs, dreamy textures, and deep catalog cuts only reinforced how naturally they can move between aggression and melancholy without losing their identity.
What made the performance stand out was not just the rarity of the song choice, but the way it fit the larger set. Deftones were already in command of the moment, and the Smiths cover gave the show a colder, softer ache in the middle of all the muscle. In a festival environment where bands often lean on obvious crowd-pleasers, Deftones went a different route and ended up with one of the weekend’s most talked-about surprises.
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