Some musicians keep reinventing their sound throughout their career, carving a crooked path through new genres and instrumentation, while others continuously improve on a signature sound. The Beatles transformed from the eager pop-rock of Meet the Beatles! to the bouncy psychedelia of Sgt. Pepper’s in just three years. Bruce Springsteen, on the other hand, has hung his hat on mid-tempo anthems and an earnestly strained vocal delivery for half a century.

Whether to rupture or refine shapes not just an artist’s catalog but their relationship with fans. Last year, I reviewed the live shows of two bands who toured together but took starkly different approaches to sharing their music: The Mars Volta played entirely unreleased material, while Deftones played a mix of songs spanning their complete discography to that point. Since that time, both bands have released new albums that exemplify the contrast between change and continuity in sound.

The Mars Volta – Lucro sucio: los ojos del vacío

Supporting Deftones on the first leg of their North American tour, The Mars Volta performed their upcoming record live with not a single familiar song in the setlist. Not only that, the record they were about to release was a radical sonic departure from any of their previous material.

Volta guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez cites King Crimson’s Robert Fripp as a primary influence, and throughout the W. Bush and early Obama years, the band pummeled listeners with searing guitar solos and lengthy instrumental passages in uncountable time signatures.

But philosophically, the most Crimsonesque thing a band can do is stop sounding like King Crimson. Just as the former abandoned its old repertoire and reemerged with a revamped sound each decade, Rodriguez-Lopez and singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala resurrected their band after a decade-long hiatus and pivoted to a poppier, more Latin groove sound.

Their newest experimental space pop odyssey, Lucro sucio: los ojos del vacío, pushes the envelope further. Upon pressing play, an ethereal falsetto bubbles up as if off the walls of a steamroom. No sooner have we settled in than air raid sirens fill the air and thrust us onto a new wave dance floor. The music saunters through smoky jazz lounges, crawls through molasses so thick the bass line almost gets stuck, and surfaces in moments of melodramatic pop that could be the soundtrack to a montage from a 1980s movie. Rarely resting in one atmosphere for longer than three minutes, the album leaves you feeling like you’ve embarked on a journey full of surprising twists and turns to ultimately end up back where you started.

Now headlining their own shows rather than being the supporting act, The Mars Volta is still playing through Lucro sucio without older material live… at least until they start working on the next album.

Deftones – private music

While The Mars Volta test drove their album in front of unsuspecting audiences, Deftones kept their new album, ready to go to press in just a few months, private. Appropriately titled private music (stylized in all lowercase along with the song titles), the record features all the classic elements a Deftones fan trusts will be there: an emotionally dramatic range of moans and wails from Chino Moreno’s voice and a bass-heavy wall of guitar sludge from Stephen Carpenter, surrounded by spacey atmosphere from turntablist and keyboardist Frank Delgado.

Rather than a wholesale overhaul, private music features numerous stylistic refinements on a working formula. Chino chants verses to “locked club” that sound like a sermon delivered from the edge of a fire pit, while “departing the body” finds him singing in an unprecedentedly low register. The biggest change in private music is of spirit rather than convention: it radiates optimism. Chino, who gravitates to the more effeminate and less distorted end of Deftones’ sound, wrote many of the guitar parts while Carpenter was dealing with a type 2 diabetes diagnosis. The record’s heaviest track, “my mind is a mountain,” feels like a climb toward enlightenment, while “milk of the madonna” sports a bouncy chorus that sounds like a hat tip to The Smashing Pumpkins’ “Bodies” and erupts in spiritual ecstasy.

The consistency of Deftones’ sound can be partly attributed to their choices in producer: two producers are responsible for eight of their ten records. private music finds the band working with Nick Raskulinecz, and sounds very much like a return to the tight structure and clean focus of the previous fan-favorite records he produced: 2010’s Diamond Eyes and 2012’s Koi No Yokan. Songs rarely wander beyond verse and chorus, which is arguably Deftones at their best: the band’s most progressive album, 2016’s Gore, is also one of their least popular.

Good news for fans: now that private music has been digested and well-received, most of its songs are now part of Deftones live setlists. “infinite source,” a glowing memorialization of the band’s connection to each other and to live fans, is fittingly among the new numbers being toured.

It’s difficult to venture into unfamiliar musical territory and even harder to bring old fans along like The Mars Volta has with Lucro sucio. But nor is it easy to keep making music in a familiar vein that still sounds fresh and inspired like private music does. Pulling the rug out from under listeners versus building on what already works are divergent strategies to achieve longevity in rock. That each approach has resonated with a different fan base is a testament to the trust each band has cultivated in their own growth trajectory.