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.
Sleep Token’s metal bona fides wouldn’t matter if their songs were good. There’s hardly any guitar work on Even in Arcadia, so the bulk of the record consists of Vessel singing over programmed drums and synths. The production sounds like it was cooked up by beatmakers who haven’t listened to rap music since Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book. Vessel’s rapping is so swagless and pasty that he makes Jack Harlow sound like Jeezy. When he’s not aping Views-era Drake flows (“Emergence”), he’s either crooning like a wedding band covering the Weeknd (“Provider”) or quivering over the piano with a try-hard achiness that’s readymade for Marvel-movie kissing scenes (“Even in Arcadia”).
Sleep Token never even allow the chance for Stockholm Syndrome to set in. They write songs that stop and start like an inveterate track-skipper grabbing hold of the aux cord. Album opener “Look to Windward” stuffs six different motifs into its eight-minute runtime, and every transition vies to be more abrupt and incoherent than the last. It’s less a song than a compilation of mismatched snippets glued together hastily. “Emergence” is a rag doll of cheesy EDM refrains, cornball rapping, faux-Deftones alt-metal churn, and a saxophone outro that screams, “We hired a saxophonist.”
Across all 10 of these endurance tests, Even in Arcadia feels means-tested to maximize cross-market potential. At least System of a Down succeeded at drawing from a multitude of disparate styles by grinding them into a genreless pulp. By contrast, Sleep Token’s music is genre-stuffed, an illogical hodgepodge without a grand thematic vision. The album’s lyrical narrative is an inscrutable tavern puzzle for fans about the sometimes abusive, sometimes romantic deity Sleep, a bit of lore Sleep Token have been building out since their 2019 debut, Sundowning. On previous albums, Vessel’s fictional drama with Sleep and the singer’s real-life romantic dealings were tangled in ambiguity.
Even in Arcadia drops some of the smoke and mirrors and teases genuine honesty as Vessel sings plainly about his struggles to maintain the band’s charade. In “Caramel,” he speaks directly to his fanbase and cries that “this stage is a prison,” admitting that he’s at once thankful for his career and tormented by the parasocial fame that comes with it. He calls out fans who scream his government name at shows, then displays a rare flare of introspection by acknowledging that his anonymous charade has backfired: “I guess that’s what I get for trying to hide in the limelight.”
This self-awareness is an interesting grace note to Sleep Token’s normal theatrics, but the accompanying music—a collision of whitewashed reggaeton and paint-by-numbers djent—is so cloying that it’s difficult to appreciate. Vessel returns to the subject again on “Damocles,” but the self-reflection is hampered by hokey clichés and mixed metaphors (“When the river runs dry and the curtain is called”) that offer little real insight. Sleep Token are good at feigning elegance: By titling songs based on biblical (“Gethsemane”) and mythological (“Damocles”) references, they cloak their subject matter in a turtlenecked seriousness. But the quill-pen profundity is undercut by such fanciful Moleskine musings as, “Well I know I should be touring/I know these chords are boring/But I can’t always be killing the game.”
Even in Arcadia’s fleetingly pleasurable moments arrive when Vessel sings mournfully over stormy guitars and pummeling rock drums (the explosion in “Dangerous,” the ending of “Provider”) or shuts his trap entirely and lets the earth-shattering djent avalanches roll (the ending of “Infinite Baths”). But those amount to roughly four minutes of the album’s hour-long runtime. The remainder of Even in Arcadia is smooth, flat, edgeless, and utterly lacking in dynamic payoffs, despite its many attempts to swing from breathy ballads to bludgeoning breakdowns. Nothing rises or falls in Arcadia. Every sound just hangs stagnantly like the scent of sulfur over a polluted pond.
For many, it’s an attractive odor. Sleep Token’s ubiquitous internet buzz and history-making Billboard achievements are being touted as a win for metal. But if metal has to reconfigure itself into Benson Boone with a Spirit Halloween gift card in order to reassert its commercial authority, then maybe it’s better off toiling away in basements. At least there it can retain its dignity.
