Sleep Token might be the biggest metal band in a generation. Since their breakthrough 2023 album, Take Me Back to Eden, the masked, anonymous UK quartet has rocketed from midsize clubs to headlining major rock festivals. They have twice as many Spotify monthly listeners as Tool, a good enough antecedent for Sleep Token’s melodic and progressive sound. Their fall 2025 arena tour sold out in mere days. On May 9, they released their fourth album and first for RCA, Even in Arcadia, which is projected to land at No. 1 on the Billboard 200—a near-unprecedented feat for a band with metalcore origins.
But Even in Arcadia is a metal album made by musicians who appear petrified of metal’s fundamental pleasures—screams, breakdowns, violence, riffs, exhilaration, exaltation. Instead, Sleep Token’s major-label debut mostly offers sanitized pop-rap with all the sexed-up verve of Droopy the dog. Their bumbling composite of generic pop and trendy metalcore is both schmaltzy and dull: a vacant wasteland where joy, excitement, and intrigue—sensations that all good metal and pop should evoke—go to die.
Much of Sleep Token’s confoundingly broad appeal hinges on their shtick. Their singer-songwriter, mononymously known as Vessel, hasn’t given an interview since 2018, refuses to speak onstage, and keeps his face painted black and concealed behind his mask. The band begins every Instagram caption with “behold,” refers to its singles as “offerings,” and calls live shows “rituals.” To many, this makes Sleep Token a magical enigma. To me, this is dumb as hell.
Previous Sleep Token albums were more firmly grounded in djent, a style of rhythmic metal characterized by polymetric chugs played on downtuned eight-string guitars. Djent was pioneered at the turn of the century by Swedish extreme-metal scientists Meshuggah, then exploded in popularity worldwide in the early 2010s. Sleep Token aren’t so much innovating the form as they are plundering and prettifying artifacts from djent’s creative peak in 2013. Even in Arcadia’s sporadic metal sections can be traced back to Northlane’s cryptic post-metal djent, Issues’ rap-infused nu-djent, and After the Burial’s brutally groovy prog-djent. The difference is that Sleep Token’s approach is sleeker, softer, and more overtly commercial—an embodiment of the way the once progressive sub-style has become, well, djentrified for mass consumption in the 2020s.
Pick any one of their arena-metal predecessors, and Sleep Token’s output rings hollow by comparison. At least Linkin Park, as irredeemably corny as they became, could translate genuine pathos with undeniable shout-alongs like “Numb” and “In the End.” At least Slipknot’s biggest radio staples retained the band’s tortured disposition. Even Metallica’s most commercial gambits, Load and Reload, had songs that fucking rocked. Sleep Token never let themselves rock on Even in Arcadia. Sex and violence are only ever suggested, never displayed. The metal elements are so superficial, forced, and uninspired that they recall a college student doing volunteer work solely to pad their resume.
