Over the years, an awful lot of digital ink has been spilled debating the question of whether or not Deftones are numetal. For a while, it seemed that the consensus was “No, they’re not numetal because they are good.” However, since Covid broke, it seems that there has been a group of young bands offering a rebuttal: “Yes, Deftones is numetal, and that is what makes them good.”

One of these acts is Fleshwater, featuring three members of metalcore outfit vein.fm, themselves no strangers to numetal adjacency (their newest record even has a turntablist). And while their walls of fuzzy guitars and laid back vocals have definite influences in shoegaze and space rock, their riffs are rife with both the heaviness and grooviness that dominated the JNCOs clad sounds of the turn of the millennium.

And, uh, it kinda rules?

First things first though: while there are a number of bands unironically embracing numetal’s tropes, I’m not sure any of them nail the aesthetic as well as Fleshwater. Even apart from the high-contrast photo of the rubber duck and the crayon-like scrawl of the band name, the overall art direction is filled with contextless toys photographed in stark, unwelcoming lighting. The unsettling reappropriation of childhood emblems hits the late 90s numetal gimmick dead on. I can absolutely see this art in a CD binder next to Korn and Limp Bizkit discs.

As for the music itself, though, there is a tastefulness here that those bands lacked. Theirs is a revisionist view of numetal that omits its biggest flaws. While there are still plenty of ignorant caveman riffs, it lacks the sort of ignorance that so often got  numetal fans to be labeled a danger to themselves and others. There is angst galore, yes, but it doesn’t feel “angsty” for its own sake. Rather, that angst is seasoned with a bittersweetness that feels more wizened than adolescent.

Maybe that’s just me trying to counter the cringe I’ve associated with numetal in the last twenty years. I wrote in my Hybrid Theory post that I felt embarrassed at how deeply some of those songs still moved me, and there are moments across this disc where I might hear a bit and think, “should I be enjoying this as much as I am?” The answer is yes. Hell, even Pitchfork gave this a score in the high sevens, writing that it melded together the various threads of 90s alt rock into a single cohesive whole. Is it cringe? Somehow, no, but even if it was, who cares?