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Rating: After hearing their name thrown around here and there, I eventually started listening to them myself and ended up falling into their trap for a few months. What struck me most about Sleep Token is essentially the fact that they unite two extremely distant worlds, two opposing factions, and manage to do so with such naturalness that they seem incredibly close, if not even friends; in truth, the two factions never really merge, they never take the stage at the same time, but coexist peacefully within the same sonic ecosystem (and so within the same track), taking turns—first one takes the lead, then the other—and each is fully appreciative of the other's role, giving it the utmost respect.
I’ve always been drawn to contamination (okay, in this case "alternation")—while on the other hand, I’ve had more trouble loving "pure" genres—so it’s no surprise I was enchanted by Sleep Token. They build bridges between sounds that seemed irreconcilable until the day before. On one side, there’s eight-string extreme metal; on the other, pop, rap, R’n’B, and even the much-despised trap! These guys are capable of moving from Imagine Dragons to Meshuggah, from minimalist electronic beats to blast beats, from neo-soul vocals to rap all the way to screaming, doing so with a fluidity where nothing ever feels forced. Genre fusion is quite common in music, but here it’s newsworthy because it brings together two worlds that essentially despise each other; the typical pop listener, or worse, the kid on the bus with friends blasting trap from his phone, hates metal (maybe he considers it "noise," or maybe he just can’t make sense of its racket), while the purist metalhead hates commercial pop even more, or perhaps hates even more to see his own genre overly simplified or, worse, enslaved to current trends just to reach a broader audience. Needless to say, it's an incredibly divisive approach; there are those who appreciate their boldness and those who criticize them, seeing them as a living parody. Their lightness has earned them both widespread success and made them the butt of jokes among many purists.
It’s important to note, however, that their commercial essence is kept in check—they never truly become a catchy band and, if they do, it’s only for brief moments. The tempos are mostly slow, they often sink into piano melodies, there’s a lot of depth and introspection, but also room for darker moments, with gloomy guitars, as well as crescendos of intensity and emotion inherited from a certain post-rock (yes, they are featured on Progarchives and included in that category, even if they are not strictly a prog band, let alone post-rock).
At this point someone might say to me... are you reviewing Sleep Token or are you reviewing "Even in Arcadia"? Well, you’re right, but in these first four albums, Sleep Token’s offering hasn’t yet evolved—perhaps it’s still too early for that. However, "Even in Arcadia" is the album that takes everything to the extreme, pushing every element to its peak, heightening the contrasts, with the potential risk of further fueling the shitstorm against them. This is the record where the trendiest trap-influenced electronic beats emerge more frequently and unapologetically, as if to say <
It’s hard to say whether Sleep Token are a metal band that wants to be pop, or a refined, eclectic pop band that also wants to be metal—honestly, it’s more likely the latter—but in any case, it seems they have come to earth to deliver a hidden message that not everyone has caught: we can act tough, be metalheads, or pretend to be alternative as much as we want, but in the end, deep down and in the world around us, we all have a pop side, we are all a bit of a "popstar." They present themselves to the public visibly masked, but paradoxically, they have unmasked the rest of us. The purist metalhead, the snobby progger, or the alternative kid who criticizes them… eh, quite simply hasn’t understood the message.
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