Back in 2018, the Boston hardcore band Vein released Errorzone, a splattering and overwhelming debut album of frantic chaos, time-signature switch-ups, titanic choruses, and occasional bursts of shit like jungle breakbeats. The album, influenced both by nu-metal and by the math-damaged hardcore of Dillinger Escape Plan, was a powerful beast, and it’s made Vein one of the biggest young hardcore bands out there. Now some members of Vein are making entirely different music in a new band called Fleshwater.

We don’t yet know which members of Vein are in Fleshwater. There are no credits on the Bandcamp page, and Vein simply tweeted a link to Fleshwater’s three-song demo over the weekend, writing that some members of Vein have this other thing going. But it’s out there now: Three songs of murky, dreamy ’90s-style metallic alt-rock. There’s a little bit of shoegaze in the sounds on that demo, and there’s a whole lot of Deftones. (Vein, as it happens, played at Deftones’ Día De Los Deftones festival in 2018.) Seems like, between this and Higher Power’s 27 Miles Underwater, there’s a whole lot of Deftones in hardcore-adjacent music lately.

Anyway, that’s fine, since Vein is great and Deftones are great. The Fleshwater demo is a cool piece of hazy guitar-trudge music, and I could see it leading in some interesting directions. Stream it below.

You can name your price to get Fleshwater’s demo at Bandcamp.