Where Did the White Pony Come From? The Clip-Art Horse Behind Deftones' Most Iconic Album Cover
The white horse silhouette on Deftones' 2000 album White Pony is now one of rock's most recognizable symbols, printed on T-shirts and caps and inked as tattoos. But the image started as something far less deliberate: frontman Chino Moreno pulling an illustration from a clip-art database — before a single song on the record had been written. Far Out Magazine revisited the story in a feature published in August 2026.
A title before a note of music
According to Moreno, speaking to Kerrang!, the album's name and cover concept trace back to a lyric from a 1980s song by Danish duo Laid Back: "If you want to ride, ride the white pony" — a fairly transparent drug reference. Moreno ran with the phrase, searched clip art for a matching image, found the horse silhouette, and decided on the spot that it would be the band's emblem.
"We decided we were going to call it White Pony before we'd written any of the songs," Moreno said. "We've only ever done that once, and it's kind of unbelievable that it became such an iconic thing."
A hard record to make
White Pony was also the most difficult record the band had made up to that point. Creative friction between members ran high, the band's already indulgent lifestyle intensified during recording, and label pressure led to a song Moreno later called a "mistake." During recording, Moreno picked up a guitar on a Deftones record for the first time; the band went into the studio with no concrete musical blueprint, guided only by the image of a pony and the double meaning of the title. Drummer Abe Cunningham described the album as "a reaction against everything going on" at the time — as the nu metal wave was peaking, Deftones pushed outward instead, fusing metal, trip-hop, and shoegaze into one sound.
The band's first two albums, Adrenaline (1995) and Around the Fur (1997), had already shown their ability to bring emotional depth to hard rock; White Pony pushed that further, turning a piece of clip art into a symbol embraced by a generation.