What’s the Deal With Sleep Token?

Since emerging in 2016, the English prog-metal outfit Sleep Token have become one of rock’s most enigmatic success stories. Operating in cloaked pseudonymity — their core members are known as Vessel and II, and they perform in elaborately detailed costumes — they’ve crafted a wide-ranging musical world that’s felt distinctly 21^st century. Using the bludgeoning riffs and heavy drums commonly associated with metal as a jumping-off point, their music is full of left turns and unexpected tonal shifts, making them as hard to pigeonhole as they are to identify.

Even In Arcadia, the group’s fourth album, doesn’t quite open the cloak, but it does add intrigue — and existential depth — to the band’s already-thick book of myth. “Will you halt this eclipse in me?” Vessel wails on the opening cut “Look To Windward,” a shape-shifting cut that surrounds the vocalist in (at different moments) dial-tone synths, charging strings, trap drums, and commanding piano chords, all of which are eventually steamrolled by heavy guitars and crashing drums. As an opening statement, it’s a blaring red signal that nothing coming next will be as it seems, or what a listener might expect. 

From there, the snarling “Emergence” veers between ghostly beauty and arpeggiated madness, eventually finding refuge, first in gathering-storm-cloud guitars that are sliced through by Vessel’s suddenly angelic voice, then by the sort of saxophone solo that indicates a lonely nightfall. “Provider” is a conflicted love song where Vessel’s layered vocals add hope to his wedding-vow-ready declaration “I can give you what you want,” despite that assurance being bracketed by riff-led chaos. Elsewhere, the songs dig even deeper into the conflicting aspects of 21^st-century notoriety. “Caramel” skip-steps along a groove, its momentum slowly building as Vessel deals with the complexities of existing in public while keeping his identity a secret. “So I’ll keep dancin’ along to the rhythm/ The stage is a prison, a beautiful nightmare,” he trills amidst music-box chimes, his world-weariness laid as bare as it could be.   

If moments like that reveal one aspect of Sleep Token’s mythologies, it’s that Vessel is a balladeer at heart. His voice is a sturdy burr that flutters with intensity on cuts like the windswept title track and soars into its upper register when necessary, making moments like the sparkling yet troubled treatise on creative anxiety “Damocles” arresting; its occasional resemblance to the yowl of Bastille leader Dan Smith adds even more facets to Sleep Token’s introductions of other styles, like the glassy, trap snare-propelled “Past Self.” Closing track “Infinite Baths” is similarly stark, Vessel’s increasingly clear-eyed view of the world mirrored by icy electronics: “I have fought so long to be here/ I am never going back,” he declares, a mantra that could double as a slogan for Sleep Token’s ever-evolving vision of rock that’s sonically and emotionally huge.