Photo by Andy Ford
With their fourth album, Even In Arcadia, Sleep Token continue their trajectory as a modern-day metal phenomenon. A phenomenon in today’s terms – one that has seen exponential growth in their popularity since their inception in 2016, within a metal scene where it can take ten, sometimes twenty years, to become an “overnight” success. As the accessibility of their songwriting on this album asks again, can we even say Sleep Token belongs to the metal scene? Or does it signify that heavy music has bloomed beyond its boundaries into something altogether different?
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that Sleep Token’s success accelerated over the pandemic. I saw them in the Autumn of 2021 when they headlined West London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire. As well as a heaving mosh in the standing area, there was increased vociferousness in the audience from the last gig of theirs I saw in February 2020 at North London’s Islington Assembly Hall. My main memory of that first encounter was bassist III’s roundhouse kicks when the heavy bits kicked in. It made sense that this plangent and introverted band would draw people to their flame during COVID. Singer Vessel was a container for bedroom listeners to pour in their woes, hopes and fears whilst stuck at home. Like the best pop, intimacy becomes universal. Like the best metal, emotions are set on fire for all present to feel the heat.
Sleep Token’s headline slot at Download Festival next month is a significant testament to their leap up following 2023’s Take Me Back To Eden and singles like “Chokehold” and “The Summoning”. The latter showcased a multi-layered, multi-part approach to their songwriting which thrilled the band’s audience and beyond. It also shows that the festival bookers have been listening. Fans had been crying out for a refresh of the Download headliner class for years. The 2022 edition felt like a nadir, when KISS and Iron Maiden topping the bill filled the mainstage with septuagenarians. Society is getting older, but Download was desperate for new blood. The only thing curious about Sleep Token’s ascension this year is the passing over of Gojira, whose headbanging/head-rolling appearance at the Olympics opening ceremony in 2024 was a cultural milestone for the genre. Instead they are headlining the much smaller British Bloodstock Festival in August. By letting Sleep Token headline first, Download isn’t just embracing the next generation of metal. The festival is evincing how strongly it is interrelated with modern pop music.
There’s continuity with heavy-rock archetypes in what Sleep Token does. The masks and elaborate costumes, the cryptic messaging with fans, the ingenious marketing, the refusal to do interviews, and the obscurity of the identity of its members, has precedence in a range of bands, from Gwar to Slipknot to Ghost. They provide just the right amount of mystique and ritual to satisfy an easily bored generation. But it’s in their sound itself that Sleep Token’s rupture with metal’s history is most apparent. In their programming, Vessel’s vocals, the lovelorn pathos of their lyrics, they are unashamedly pop first and foremost – a blend of Justin Vernon and Hozier fronting a woozy Meshuggah. It’s the music produced and consumed in an online landscape where algorithmic tastemaking and listener open mindedness are dissolving genre boundaries; where we can access everything everywhere all at once.
Eli Enis published what felt like an important, if withering, article on Stereogum last year: Metal’s Stadium Class Is Less Metal Than Ever. He cited Sleep Token, Bad Omens and Spiritbox as a new vanguard in metal that isn’t really metal at all: “they all use metal more like a signifier than an artistic framework.”
“It’s that the totality of their sounds – not just their singles, but album cuts, too – are directly dialed into major label pop, and they’re explicitly taking influence from some of the most mainstream, non-metal pop singers of the day,” he continued.
Sleep Token seem to parody their own songwriting formula – seductive lull and molten explosion – on their recent single “Caramel”, with its ton-tonne hammer second section. Drummer II (a monster talent who has even been permitted to be interviewed by YouTube channel Drumeo) delivers a series of dextrous fills on “Damocles” that upend its tinkling piano-driven melody. Elsewhere on Even In Arcadia the colours are turned up: the hip-hop beats of “Dangerous”, the quotation of a famous Pink Floyd guitar motif on “Infinite Baths”, and the sultry sax of “Emergence” for which a steamroller guitar riff paves the way. It’s in this high-contrast song that Sleep Token sound closest to Deftones (specifically the latter’s “Beware”), a band who have themselves been an extraordinarily popular anomaly in heavy music for more than thirty years.
As a period, thirty years ago is significant here. 1995 was something of a watershed year for metal, as documented in a think piece published recently on The Quietus by Keith Kahn-Harris: Warriors of the Wasteland: How Heavy Metal Survived 1995. In it, he argues how the diversity of albums like Fear Factory’s Demanufacture, At The Gates’ Slaughter of the Soul and Meshuggah’s Destroy Erase Improve revealed an uneven and fractured landscape: “There is no one ‘true’ metal narrative of the 1990s.”
Though Kahn-Harris says he has come to “bury” this era in his article, for me it was a thrilling time that smashed genres together: hip hop, electronica, industrial, drum ‘n' bass, you name it. Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of this was an album he doesn’t mention, White Zombie’s sample-strewn Astro-Creep: 2000.
“Metal didn’t come close to dying but it did come close to dissipating,” Kahn-Harris writes. “In many ways it is an extraordinary surprise that metal came back from the brink; it happened nonetheless. A bad year; yet what has survived has become ageless.”
In 1995 metal entered its postmodern era and never left. Sleep Token are the inheritors of its legacy. Particularly that of Meshuggah, who in 1995 weren’t even the Meshuggah we know now. That entity would arrive with 1998’s titanic Chaosphere. That Sleep Token’s savvy is to combine distilled Djent riffs with electro-pop has long been recognised. But that misses something essential. Sleep Token writes much better and more interesting songs than the legion of Meshuggah copycats. Something that Anthrax/Pantera drummer Charlie Benante praised them for when he was slamming the “lack of creativity” in the modern metal scene in an interview with me in 2023.
Sleep Token also deserve recognition as a metal band in the mid-nineties vein, breaking from the genre’s traditions and carving a wildly unexpected new path. The difference is in just how wildly commercially successful the band looks set to become. And from a British perspective, they compare with Bring Me The Horizon’s innovation within the genre. With a sold-out arena tour of the US coming up, they seem set to truly break America.
Beyond this, as much as Vessel is a pop-metal mastermind, he also has a healthy respect for the genre’s classicism. Largely dispensing with their own lore on Even In Arcadia has freed him up to use loaded symbols from elsewhere. Look at the album’s title, and songs “Damocles” and “Gethsemane”. The latter really stands out, simmering with pain and resentment in its narrator's depiction of his “harlequin bride” and his position as her “undercover lover”, against a backdrop of late-period Paramore-esque nu-wave cut and thrust. Sleep Token dips its music into the well of mythology, again just enough not to alienate anyone, but instead to make the lyrical imagery and import of the songs more vivid. The title track refers to the dying gods of old who it transpires have been alive and well, “sharpening their blades”.
Heavy metal culture is stalking Sleep Token, at once wanting to crown them and potentially seeking to topple them. Make no mistake, the band’s forthcoming imperial phase will see vicious resistance and what should be even more savage mutations in the extreme fringes of the genre to counter the populist centre, as newcomers and normies flood in following Even In Arcadia.
This, though, is Sleep Token’s element. The band thrives as headliner and outsider; the incumbent and the pretender; the lover and the spurned. Vessel’s knack for arresting imagery finds the narrator of album opener “Look to Windward” washed up on a far shoreline, “coughing up blood in the twilight”. Vulnerability is at the core of what they stand for and from where they derive their strength. Their dual identity as both pop insurgents and metal’s newest mask bearers will draw critical barbs from all quarters, but I imagine they’ll keep their silence on the matter. Like Eden is one apple bite away from the fall, Arcadia is a paradise a breath away from death. As they climb metal's pinnacle, Sleep Token might represent the end of its modern era. What comes next is the stuff dreams (or nightmares) are made of.
-----
The 'Even In Arcadia' Tour marks Sleep Token's only U.S. headlining dates on the year. A complete list of dates and cities can be found below, though tickets have already sold out entirely.
Even In Arcadia, the new album from Sleep Token arrives May 9th via RCA Records. Get the album - HERE
Even In Arcadia Tour Dates
September 16, 2025 - Duluth, GA - Gas South Arena
September 17, 2025 - Orlando, FL - Kia Center
September 19, 2025 - Louisville, KY - Louder Than Life*
September 20, 2025 – Greensboro, NC - First Horizon Coliseum
September 22, 2025 - Brooklyn, NY - Barclays Center
September 23, 2025 - Worcester, MA - DCU Center
September 24, 2025 - Philadelphia, PA - Wells Fargo Center
September 26, 2025 - Detroit, MI - Little Caesars Arena
September 27, 2025 - Cleveland, OH - Rocket Arena
September 28, 2025 - Rosemont, IL - Allstate Arena
September 30, 2025 - Lincoln, NE - Pinnacle Bank Arena
October 1, 2025 - Minneapolis, MN - Target Center
October 3, 2025 - Denver, CO - Ball Arena
October 5, 2025 - West Valley City, UT - Maverik Center
October 7, 2025 - Tacoma, WA - Tacoma Dome
October 8, 2025 - Portland, OR - Moda Center
October 10, 2025 - Oakland, CA - Oakland Arena
October 11, 2025 - Los Angeles, CA - Crypto.com Arena
*Festival
