Artist: Sleep Token
Album: Take Me Back to Eden
Year: 2023
Grade: B
In Brief: One of 2023’s most acclaimed – and most polarizing – metal records is largely concerned with making sounds that one would be hard-pressed to describe as “metal”, or really even “rock”. Sleep Token is a band that is capable of being blisteringly heavy, but that is also fascinated with ambient soundscapes and computerized “bedroom pop”-type sounds, dodging genre expectations from one song to the next, or even at multiple points within a song. At times it sounds like an attempt to be all things to all listeners gone horribly awry – but there’s something about the cold, calculated nature of it all that lines up frighteningly well with their creepy masks and insistence on anonymity. Any humanity that exists behind the facade is subsumed in their slavish devotion to their bizarre religious lore. As weird as this all sounds, it’s also strangely addictive.
I can just imagine certain people rolling their eyes when I try to tell them that I’ve been getting into Sleep Token. The mysterious London-based band, who only ever appears in masked form with their human identities deliberately kept a secret, seems to be one of those polarizing bands that elicits incredibly strong reactions whenever their name is brought up. By way of their image and the corner of the music world that seems to talk about them the most, they’re a metal band – though you’ll often see descriptions of their music with a qualifying prefix attached, such as “post-metal”, “progressive metal”, or even “pop metal”. And honestly, there are some days where I’m not even sure if any of those genre labels are accurate. Sure, Sleep Token has metal and hard rock influences, which come to the forefront at the heaviest moments of their songs – but not on every song, or even really the majority of them. A lot of their output might be better described as dark, DIY electropop, with R&B and even hip-hop influences in a few cases, sometimes erupting into louder breakdowns full of live rock instrumentation, but just as easily subverting the listener’s expectations by remaining mellow and synthetic for the duration of a song, or even pulling off a switch into another genre entirely without missing a beat. It’s no wonder that this approach gets mixed reactions. If you’re a metalhead and you put on any of the three albums Sleep Token has made thus far, it’s bound to feel like you’re trudging through a desert while waiting for all of the slow and mid-tempo material to pass before things really start to get intense again. If you’re not a metalhead, or if you’re like me and you tend to be into the kind of metal that is more melodic and less “melt your face off” aggressive, the occasional atonal breakdowns and tormented screams are probably going to throw you for a loop just when you were getting into the vibe of their mellower material. I feel like you have to be into a lot of different kinds of music for a band like this to really click with you – and even then, it’s a bit of a gamble. So it’s not surprising to me that a lot of folks react to this band with a sense of betrayal, feeling like they’ve been set up to expect one thing and then massively let down by all the things they weren’t expecting. This is why it genuinely caught me off guard, after trying to absorb their latest album Take Me Back to Eden for myself, that it was not only getting strong reviews from a fair amount of rock and metal critics, but that it also scored high on “Best of 2023” lists from many of them. Whether this is brilliant art, or whether we’re all being elaborately punked, probably remains to be seen in a lot of people’s minds.
Now I probably wouldn’t have even had a band like Sleep Token on my “must listen” list if it weren’t for the enthusiastic recommendation of a friend who just so happened to have me as a captive audience in his car for a couple hours. How someone who is a fan of a band describes that band to you can honestly make or break your first impressions of that band. I knew this friend to generally be into much heavier music than I was (we had Spiritbox as a common interest, though they’re admittedly on the extreme side of my personal tastes and probably on the poppier end of his), and his first offhand mentions of Sleep Token, involving a concert he’d been to recently, left me with the impression that this was one of those brutally dark and heavy bands where the mosh pit was gonna get going hot and heavy and never let up. We had been on a weekend retreat to the mountains together last October, and he was my ride home, and after perusing the new Spiritbox single (which was more than heavy enough to scare the other occupants of our carpool a little), he gave me a crash course in Sleep Token, generally focusing on the material from their albums that was more long and twisty, not unlike the windy roads we were navigating on our way back to our suburban homes. I was taken aback by how atmospheric a lot of the songs were for the first several minutes, knowing that a heavy breakdown must be just around the corner, but wrongly predicting when (or even whether) it would occur about 50% of the time. Part of the reason I don’t listen to very much truly heavy music is because when the music is on constant full blast and the vocals are all screams, it’s kind of like watching a slasher flick where the blood and gore never end – you get numb to it once you get over the initial shock and nausea. I’m more of a suspense/thriller fan, someone who appreciates the slow burn when a movie is building up to a scary moment, but you don’t know when it’s going to jump out at you or how intense it’s going to be – and at the end of it all, you expect some sort of a satisfying resolution to the dark mystery. Sleep Token easily falls into the musical equivalent of the latter category.
My friend briefly explained the band’s lore to me, how the lead singer and primary songwriter was a man known only as Vessel, who played most of the instruments alongside a drummer only known as II, with band members III and IV rounding out their live lineup. These people wore masks at all times when recording and performing, with their true identities apparently known to no one outside of their inner circle. Their name came from a manufactured religion that was central to their mythology, where humans exist in servitude of a god known as “Sleep”, who of course can only be interacted with while sleeping – a state of being that doesn’t seem like it’s easy to come by, possibly because this god delights in depriving its subjects the privilege. Most people, when given this elevator pitch on a band, would probably manage a bewildered “Okay, sure”, feign interest long enough to find a break in the conversation, and then back away slowly. I was open-minded yet skeptical at the beginning, yet by the end of the car ride, I was genuinely eager to go home and give Sleep Token a listen for myself. Now that’s how you get a friend into a band – I can only wish that some of my attempts to foist material from my favorite bands onto unsuspecting passengers had been anywhere near this successful!
Listening more closely to Take Me Back to Eden, and eventually to Sleep Token’s earlier albums that together form a trilogy, I can see how their mythology informs the mental state that I imagine Vessel to be in, as his creepily dark and yet weirdly smooth voice navigates through all of the quiet and loud, soft and heavy, genre-hopping passages of Sleep Token’s songs. At times it’s heavily Autotuned or otherwise distorted, giving it a sort of “uncanny valley” effect where you could almost swear someone dumped a set of self-contradictory parameters into a music-generating AI and let it run wild, cherry-picking the best results and passing them off as the work of flesh-and-blood humans. That’s not what I think really happened – but honestly, if it were someday revealed that AI played a role in the creation of their music, I wouldn’t be shocked. (Everything Everything put out an AI-assisted record a couple years back, so there’s precedent for this sort of thing being done well.) The results are coherent enough to make it seem more to me like humans with an intentional design were sometimes deliberately imitating an artificial creative process, just to further distract from the notion that singers and musicians should be celebrities whose personal lives you want to know stuff about – the deliberate lack of an identity is part of the vibe here. Sleep Token’s music is open-ended enough that you could imagine a number of their songs being about all sorts of vaguely unsettling scenarios even if you knew nothing about the mythology, so it’s not like a ton of supplementary reading is required to just jump into one of their records and be fascinated and/or a little creeped out by what you’re hearing. And I see how the different ingredients they bring to the table could be incredibly off-putting for a lot of listeners, but to me, the whole idea behind it is pretty fascinating.
With all of that said, you’ll notice above that I’ve given this record a B, which generally means that a band did a good job overall, but wasn’t quite consistent enough to keep me spellbound all the way through. So yeah, there are some drawbacks to their unconventional approach. First off is the sheer length and pacing of this record – it’s over an hour long, nearly all the songs (including the heavier ones) are slow to mid-tempo, and the novelty of not knowing what they’re gonna do from one minute to the next during some of the longer songs can turn into a feeling that certain songs are anti-climactic once you get to know them better. Vessel’s broad range of musical influences is impressive, but there’s a bit of a “jack of all trades, master of none” problem here – some of the scream-heavy climaxes with their djent-style riffing can seem a bit one-note, while on the flipside, some of the softer material that relies on programming and general ambiance, while it certainly echoes modern genre trends, isn’t quite as innovative as what some of the forerunners of hip-hop or electropop production could have come up with. Ironically, the moments where I’m the most “wowed” by the musicianship come in the simpler songs – the ones with simple but effective piano or guitar melodies that may or may not lead to power chord-heavy melodic rock climaxes a few minutes in. If I were to hand-pick my favorite Sleep Token songs and give you a playlist of just those, you might have no idea how broad of a range of styles they incorporate on a typical album. Everything they try, I think they do reasonably well, but there isn’t any one genre where I’d say they’re truly exceptional. The funny thing, though, is that this seems to even further enforce the idea that it’s all being made by some shell of a man who has sold his soul to a false god. In his attempt to signal boost that god’s message, he’s grabbing at whatever contemporary trends he can think of and mashing them together in ways that aliens might, if they were studying human culture but not fully understanding it. He’ll try anything once to get the listener’s attention and get Sleep’s manifesto out there. This sounds eerily familiar to me, as someone who was practically raised on Christian rock (and who is still happy to defend more artful examples of it, while being of the general opinion that most of it is just repackaging ideas from more talented mainstream artists). Either this is a brilliantly subversive commentary on using music as a vehicle for proselytizing one’s religious beliefs… or else it’s just a sign of a band that wants to try a lot of different things, but that isn’t yet sure how to keep all the seams from showing so obviously. Part of what makes the Sleep Token experience so intriguing is trying to figure out the “why” behind all of the strange things they’ve done. When they give you something relatively “normal” sounding that actually lets a bit of the emotion and humanity behind the mask shine through, it’s an unexpected bonus – but MAN, does it hit hard when they get it right.
INDIVIDUAL TRACKS:
1. Chokehold
While this track kicks off the final installment of a trilogy of albums, it’s actually a pretty good place for newbies like me to get a feel for the Sleep Token mythology, and also for their tendency to blend smooth, atmospheric elements together with harsh, dissonant ones. The intro and verses of this song would seem rather mellow if not for the gloomy chord progression, the serrated metallic effect that makes the keyboard and guitar parts sound a bit choppy, and of course the dark lyrics, which get us up to speed on the relationship that Vessel has to Sleep, essentially recognizing that because he was made by Sleep and Sleep controls every element of the world around him, he has no choice but to offer his utter devotion to this being. It’s a joyless form of worship, an offering given because there are no other options, which makes the analogy that “you’ve got me in a chokehold” rather apt – the consequences are implied to be dire, possibly even leading to death, if he were to stray from this path that’s been laid out for him. The chorus, while it’s not nearly as abrasive as the most extreme end of Sleep Token’s metal influences, is certainly a powerful one, with its buzzing, bending guitar notes swooping in like a swarm of angry hornets. There’s a sick sort of beauty to this song’s calmer moments, though – the layering of Vessel’s voice in occasional bits of soothing harmony, the slow and surprisingly syncopated rhythm that doesn’t really come to the forefront until the drums kick in, even the distorted droning feels like a post-modern take on an ancient call to worship. If the language here is disquieting – basically implying that you do what your god says or otherwise it will choke the life out of you – then well, we probably have centuries of real-life dogma for numerous religions to thank for that.
Grade: A-
2. The Summoning
This six and a half minute freakshow would probably be the best track to choose if you wanted to give a new listener a sense of Sleep Token’s musical schizophrenia. It’s one of the more immediate tracks on the record, dropping us into an onslaught of heavy yet melodic power chords right away, and for most of its run it’s actually using its heaviness to inspire a sense of awe rather than foreboding in the listener. The chorus vocals absolutely soar as Vessel lays out, in rather vague but compelling terms, the sense of euphoria he hopes to get out of his brush with the supernatural: “Raise me up again/Take me past the edge/I want to see the other side.” But the flight of fancy dips into a few rugged canyons where we’re clinging on for dear life through a series of djent-influenced riffs and tortured screams – this is the heavier side of Sleep Token, and while it doesn’t emerge very often or necessarily at the expected climaxes, I think it’s interwoven quite effectively into this song, even giving way to a reasonably good guitar solo at one point. We’re maybe three or four minutes into this anthemic track before the bottom end drops out completely, leaving us on a calming, ambient outro that seems to go on for another minute or so, with little more than the synthetic glow of some keyboards and faint bits of piano melody to sustain us, until the drums come back in and… what in the everloving HELL, is that a funk riff?! The outro of the song completely changes its character with its Frankenstein-like stop-start rhythm, the distortion pedals on the guitars having been abruptly changed from “RAWK!” to “wah-wah”. It’s weird, it’s kind of amusing, and at times I’m tempted to think it might have been one too many elements forced into an already overstuffed song. Something about the audacity of it – that whole “uncanny valley” effect where it sounds like an approximation of funk by an alien intelligence that has only ever read about the genre – makes me find it entertaining despite my initial misgivings. The fervent devotion being expressed in the lyrics only serves to make it weirder: “I’ve got a river running right into you/I’ve got a blood trail, red in the blue/Something you say or something you do/The taste of the divine.”
Grade: B+
3. Granite
This song takes a hard turn into electropop and R&B territory – you can hear it in the processed handclaps during the verse and especially the trap-adjacent skittering beat during the chorus. Vessel has his moments where he reminds me of the whole “I’m slurring my speech because I’m too drunk/stoned to perform coherently” aesthetic that bugs me about that whole genre, but in his case it’s less of a substance-influenced thing and it has more of an “I’m more machine than man at this point” implication, which fits the vibe of the whole record despite the sudden genre shift. The lyrics to this song are downright mean, giving us the lay of the land in an incredibly toxic relationship and basically only accusing the other person of sticking around because they’re too scared to actual confront the issues that have gone unaddressed for far too long know. The line “We’d rather be six feet under than be lonely” is the one that really gets me – I’ve seen my fair share of relationships that try to make things work at grave risk to the mental and sometimes physical health of one or both parties, because they’re too afraid to go it alone after that much time together. Whether this song is from the point of view of Vessel, or from the point of view of a romantic partner who has been getting the short shrift because of his preoccupation with the whole Sleep cult, I can’t quite determine – there are moments when the song fits one interpretation better than the other, but then it seems to flip perspective. It’s a chilling performance no matter how you interpret it – and that’s true even before the heavy guitars come in at its climax, which is an awesome way to put an exclamation mark at the end of this troubling story.
Grade: B
4. Aqua Regia
It’ll definitely test some listeners’ patience to have two fairly downbeat, pop/R&B influenced songs in row here, especially on what’s supposed to be an acclaimed “metal” record. This one, while it emphasizes the live drums and especially the piano a bit more, doesn’t even briefly take us into heavier territory like any of the previous three tracks – and this is where I have to sort of imagine Sleep Token as an indie band making dark, DIY bedroom pop that just so happens to break out the heavy guitars and screaming every once in a while. It may seem hypocritical for me to give them that out when I’m critical of other bands like Imagine Dragons or 30 Seconds to Mars who, at least in their most radio-friendly material, seem to have entirely forgotten that they were actual bands at some point. But the music fits the mood that the lyrics are trying to convey, and these lyrics are certainly a whole lot smarter than your average hard rock band that appears to be “selling out” for crossover pop appeal. Do you even know what “Aqua Regia” is? I sure didn’t. Apparently it’s a mix of chemicals so corrosive than it can dissolve precious metals such as gold. This seems to be an analogy for either further degradation of the relationship described in “Granite”, or else some sort of addiction to a psychoactive but harmful substance that makes Vessel feel closer to Sleep despite the damage it’s doing to his body. get a load of this dense, but satisfyingly written chorus, and tell me which interpretation you think it serves better: “Aqua regia/Oxytocin running in the ether/Silicon ballrooms/Subatomic interactions, if it’s all good/Gold rush, acid flux/Saturate me, I can’t get enough Cold love, hot blood/Running to your heart when you’re thinking of…” As much as I like to joke that this album could have been some sort of bizarre AI creation, I can’t deny that those rhyming cadences are intriguing and packed with strong imagery, too much so for me to think they could’ve happened by taking the mechanized path of least resistance. Also, did I mention the absolutely lovely piano solo in the bridge? For a second there, I feel like I’ve stepped into the lounge of an uber-classy hotel. This is how Sleep Token reels me back in just when I’m tempted to think they’re sprawling out in every musical direction they can think of without a coherent plan. You listen carefully, you hear the humanity lurking under the icy cold demeanor of a song like this, and for a fleeting moment, it all starts to make sense.
Grade: B+
5. Vore
The beginning of this song is where I imagined at first that the true metal fans were rejoicing again after being left out in the cold for a few tracks. They hit you with the heavy riffs and the screaming right away. It’s actually not as intense as I felt like it was at first – they still stick to a medium tempo, and if you listen to the guitar chords underneath, it’s following a fairly simple melodic progression as well. So this song has a bit of a weird personality, where it starts off at its climax and sort of gets backed into a corner from there, only for the beast to come roaring back out again at a few points, but never really hitting you harder than that opening surprise. The lyrics certainly win points for their creepiness, as they describe some sort of a fetishistic relationship in which spiritual enlightenment is achieved by either consuming or being consumed by one’s beloved. It’s more concerned with the metaphorical implications of this than with the graphic details – so depending on whether you’re into really dark metal, that’ll either be a relief or a disappointment. And as with all things Sleep Token, there are calmer, more melodic passages in between the heavy bits. This one doesn’t strike me as anywhere near as effective as something like “The Summoning”, mainly because it hits you with its best trick right up front and then it doesn’t quite seem sure where to go from there – it’s a sonic retreat, but not a surprising swerve into a different genre like what some of the other tracks have done. And while I normally appreciate how effectively Sleep Token can change up the musical character of the song while keeping its tempo consistent, I think something a little more unhinged, like an abrupt slow-to-fast transition, might have helped to keep the listener on their toes here.
Grade: C+
6. Ascencionism
I have a rather funny memory of this otherwise very serious song, thanks to it being one of the songs my friend chose to queue up when he was first introducing me to Sleep Token during that long mountain drive. By this point he’d given me a few examples of Sleep Token’s tendency to make you wait for the big, heavy payoffs, and I came into this one fully expecting that after its very slow and sparse piano intro drifted off into silence, getting ready to do the faux-headbanging thing because I knew it would amuse our fellow passengers, and then falling into an embarrassing hole when it instead segued into a trap beat with heavily Autotuned vocals instead. I’m willing to bet that Sleep Token derives a bit of sick pleasure from the “WTF?” faces they imagine their listeners getting at these moments, but it’s notable that these moments are never played for laughs – they seem to represent turning points in the narrative, in this case where the sad opening lament leads to a bit of bitter lashing out in the same vein as “Granite”, that just so happens to be packed with deliciously dense lyrics that are sung in an almost rap-like cadence: “Who made you like this?/Who encrypted your dark gospel in body language?/Synapses snap back in blissful anguish/Tell me you met me in past lives, past life/Past what might be eating me from the inside, darling /Half algorithm, half deity Glitches in the code or gaps in a strange dream.” If all you hear when those electronic elements kick in is shameless genre adultery to bring in a more diverse audience, then I think you’re really missing out on the creepy but thought-provoking goodness underneath. And shoot, if it’s a heavy breakdown you’re looking for, then the second time’s the charm – you can tell when Vessel suddenly breaks into a sinister whisper that all hell’s about to break loose! While the harsh climax at the center of this song might riff on the same chord over and over a bit too much for my liking, it’s still impressive to me how they managed to weave these disparate elements together into a song that effectively expresses the desperation and dissatisfaction with human relationships which led Vessel down the dark path of finding refuge in his cult-like worship of Sleep. These aren’t just random elements strung together – the desolate piano melody finds its way back near the end of the song, and the simple phrase “You make me wish I could disappear” hits like a ton of bricks at this point. He’s so far gone on his all-consuming spiritual quest that the tangible relationships he’s experienced in the human world are starting to lose all meaning.
Grade: B+
7. Are You Really Okay?
I mentioned up above how sometimes the songs with the simplest ingredients could end up hitting me the hardest on this album. This song is exhibit A – my favorite track on Eden, and also one that’s almost completely unrepresentative of the sound of the album, or the band as a whole. It’s a quiet, empathetic ballad with a clean, pretty melody from the electric guitar that takes a turn toward “power ballad” as some heavier chords come in at the end, but the entire thing is firmly rooted in the accessible side of pop/rock, and I could easily imagine people getting into this who aren’t otherwise into Sleep Token. So why does it move me so much if it’s so darn basic? Because this is a rare moment on the album where the humanity shines through, giving us a glimmer of hope that our religious zealot of a narrator might actually be able to see beyond his obsession and regain some sort of a grip on the world around him. Sadly, the thing that gives him a reality check seems to be a suicide attempt on the part of someone close to him – perhaps it’s the lover he’s been coldly pushing away throughout the first half of the record. Whoever it is, they’ve clearly got some demons they’ve been trying to keep hidden, and for the first time he seems to truly notice what they’re dealing with, even though this doesn’t seem to be their first attempt. He wisely realizes he can’t simply talk them out of it and fix all their problems – once a person is so far gone that they’re willing to consider ending their own life, they need professional help and not just a layperson to tell them everything’ll be fine. But it clearly breaks his heart to see the self-harm they’ve been engaging in and to feel powerless to stop it – and to be told by this person that they feel OK even though all evidence is to the contrary. Even if the whole mythos behind Sleep Token makes no sense or if you find it off-putting, I think this is one of their songs that stands proudly on its own and communicates a heartbreaking but meaningful message without even needing to know any of the surrounding context. And it’s deeply ironic that I would connect with a song like this, because when I was a teenager, it was right in the middle of the religious right’s “Satanic Panic” and I was being inundated with messages that rock & roll bands were all trying to get you to sell your soul to false gods and to internalize suicidal thoughts and stuff like that. Now here I am, old and wise enough not to fall for that stereotype, and along comes a band whose whole deal is about a man losing his life to a made-up god, and even within this deliberately dark narrative context, the message is still very clear that it’s not worth taking your own life. Take that, all you religious stuffshirts from my formative years!
Grade: A+
8. The Apparition
We’re back to the spacey electropop/R&B on this song, with its glowy keyboards, stuttering drum programming, and Vessel unloading some of his frustrations on Sleep, this god who promises a magical spiritual retreat in exchange for total servitude, but who only ever appears in the form of brief dream visions that he can’t even confirm are truly real. I feel like the back half of this album is where the cracks in his devotion truly start to show – he’s been startled into realizing that the waking world is becoming a living hell for the people around him, and he tries to take another hit of the proverbial dream drug he’s only ever been allowed fleeting doses of, only for the high he craves to be further and further away each time. What if the thing he thought was God was really just a coping mechanism to help him run from his real-life problems, instead of something that gave him a useful perspective from which to approach those problems wisely and compassionately? Those are the sorts of questions that seem to be popping up here, not that Vessel really wants to be dealing with them – he wants to go “make trouble in the dream world , hijack Heaven with another memory now”, just like he could in the old days when these supernatural encounters were fresh and exciting and full of promise to make his life feel fuller, not emptier.
Grade: B
9. DYWTYLM
Here’s another one that I can imagine ticking off metal purists – this might be the absolute farthest from anything resembling rock or metal that Sleep Token has attempted so far, which is saying a lot given how all-over-the-place all of their records have been thus far. It’s an Autotune-drenched ballad, with a snappy programmed drum loop and a (dare I say it) bubbly keyboard sound that permeates through it – you can still tell from the vocals and the overall mood of it that this isn’t exactly happy-go-lucky pop music, but if you’re expecting any “real” instrumentation (as in, played without a computer) to break in at some point, this one’s gonna leave you cold. Potentially hot take: I love it. I think it’s one of the most interesting tracks on the album, even if it puts Sleep Token on the verge of having to trade in the “metal” card that I imagine all bands of this nature carry around and that they must surrender to the genre’s gatekeepers whenever they commit significant musical transgressions. The acronym in the title stands for “Do You Wish That You Loved Me?”, a question that Vessel asks his former lover many times here, and it sounds like a bit of a self-centered thing to ask at first, but really I think it’s about recognizing that this person is so depressed that they’re having a hard time feeling much of anything at all. (Imagine the colorful console in the movie Inside Out going completely grey and frozen, with the lead characters representing Riley’s emotions powerless to do anything about it, and that’ll give you a good enough idea of what I think is happening here.) Keeping them in the relationship with some sort of expectation that his love (which it doesn’t sound like he’s been so great expressing anyway) will somehow be reciprocated seems downright selfish, so perhaps this is a way of releasing them, of saying “I don’t expect you to feel love for me any more and that’s OK, just go get the help you need because you deserve someone better than me to walk with you through whatever you’re dealing with.” A crucial pair of lines here is, “And I’ve tried so hard to fix it all but nothing seems to help/But I cannot hope to give you what I cannot give myself.” This seems to tie back into “Are You Really Okay?”, in which he lamented that he was powerless to help this person – here he’s realizing that two extremely messed-up people in a relationship really aren’t gonna do each other much good. You can’t express adequate love to someone else – at least, not in a tangible way that does them any good – if you’re too far gone to even love yourself. This is a sad realization, but it’s an important breakthrough nonetheless.
Grade: A
10. Rain
While I’ve been enjoying the more contemplative material in the back half of this album, I will admit that it’s becoming rather ballad-heavy at this point – a pacing issue that I think all of Sleep Token’s albums struggle with. So when another sadly beautiful electronic/R&B-type track shows up here, as unique as this might’ve been if I’d encountered it earlier in the album, it starts to feel like a case of the band falling into a pattern here, and that might be the biggest weakness of their tendency to genre-hop through a record – they can only surprise us so many times before we get wise to their tricks. This song suffers a little bit for it, but otherwise it does well what a handful of tracks before it have done well – bringing the slow, melancholic piano ballad passages together with the sassier, slightly hip-hop-inflected ones with the stomping, clapping, and stuttering drum loops. The spiritual language of this track feels quite familiar, to the point where I’m almost certain I’ve heard something a lot like it from a number of the earnest “we’re religious but not a Christian band” type groups that used to catch my attention in the early 2000s, just with updated production values to fit the genre fluidity of the 2020s. Vessel has reached a point of reflection and repentance here, wanting to lose the part of himself that’s been engrossed in a self-centered pursuit, to be cleansed by the rain and the salty ocean water as he seeks atonement for his wrongdoing. Whether you interpret this as Vessel finally breaking a toxic cycle of willingly enslaving himself to a false savior, or just falling into the arms of another one and starting the cycle all over again, is up to you.
Grade: B-
11. Take Me Back to Eden
The title track – which tops out at over eight minutes – certainly provides more fodder for discussion that I could do justice here. Sleep Token seems to get tagged as a “progressive” band due to the presence of these longer epics on the albums, though I might push back on that by saying that the way they morph and change over the course of such a song is very different from how a lot of prog rock/metal bands do it – there are no long solos, no sudden shifts to weird time signatures, nothing like that. These guys are pretty insistent on keeping the tempo constant and the rhythm a steady 4/4 as they build up from gentle atmospheric toward heavier riffs, break that back down again, take another side journey into hip-hop and R&B influences, come back, and finally hit us with a blistering finale. It’s not an approach that fans of other long-winded progressive bands will necessarily appreciate, but I can appreciate Sleep Token for sticking to their guns on it. The symmetry between the softest and loudest parts is interesting as the phrase “I will travel far beyond the path of reason/Take me back to Eden”, which is sung softly early on, comes back at the most intense part of the song as a guttural scream, the lyric changed slightly to “I have traveled far beyond the path of reason.” This whole song, to me, feels like a gradual moment of dawning epiphany, the beginning of a path toward deconstruction of a dogmatic belief system that is no longer working. The name “Eden”, which of course in Judeo-Christian beliefs refers to a place of innocence where humanity began, is an interesting here (and in the title of the album, of course) – it’s an easily understood shortcut for the idea of wanting to return to a sense of innocence that can never fully be regained. Beg and plea and even scream for it as Vessel might, he’s locked out of that paradise – there’s no going back, only forward. Feeling like he’s been promised something that can never fully be delivered makes him lash out in anger at the god he’s been serving all this time – which leads to some choice quips like “I’ll take a pound of your flesh before you take a piece of my paystub” and “I don’t know what’s got its teeth in me But I’m about to bite back in anger.” The cleansing water metaphor from “Rain” bleeds over into this song, as well as the less soothing but potentially more purifying notion of being cleansed by fire, and the line “We were tangled up like branches in a flood” even makes a callback to the opening song, “Chokehold”. I wish I could say that I had a stunning “Aha!” moment when this all came together – all I’ve got are bits and pieces of ideas based on my own experience of having a more rigid religious upbringing, growing up to reject large portions of it and be angry at some of the things I was taught about God, but still feeling drawn to that idea of a higher power existing and actually having the capacity to love and nurture humanity. So I’ve got less of a clear interpretation of what this song is trying to communicate, and more of a series of moments where I’m like, “I feel what you’re going through, man”, even if the person I’m relating to, and the religion he’s grown to hate, are entirely fictional.
Grade: B
12. Euclid
The closing track, another power ballad that puts the piano in the lead role, is a thing of pure beauty that lets some long-awaited sunlight in at the end of a dark and difficult story. The lyrics are filled with so many subtle call-backs to moments from this album and their earlier ones that I couldn’t hope to do it all justice, but it’s all in service of a lyric that seems to rediscover the beauty of a person having their own identity and valuing their own well-being, no longer being victimized by an oppressive system someone else taught them to believe in. It’s the simple things that seem to captivate Vessel as he finally snaps out of his trance – the canopy of autumn leaves above him is taken as a sign of beautiful and necessary change, which was perfectly timed for me as I first discovered this album after a weekend trip in October during which some beautiful fall colors were on display. I’ll always get a mental flashback to that weekend whenever I hear this song, as it moves from its graceful piano intro to its huge, anthemic power chords (no screaming this time – it’s all super melodic) and back again, finally concluding with an electronic echo of some lyrics from the first track on Sleep Token’s first album, “The Night Belongs to God”. As he reminisces on simpler days when he and his lover lay entwined, looking up at those leaves and believing the world was a good and beautiful place, he reassigns ownership of the night: “The night belongs to you.” But what doesn’t belong to that person is him, and he in turn doesn’t belong to them, because nobody belongs to anyone else, and that’s what freedom is about, even as much as we’d like to have someone around who loves us unconditionally and does everything we want them to do. In this process of personal awakening, he may have lost his lover, but he also lost a system of beliefs that was hurting that person deeply. He’s alone, but no longer afraid to be, because now he can truly get to know – and hopefully learn how to love – himself again.
Grade: A+
WHAT’S IT WORTH TO ME?
Chokehold $1.50
The Summoning $1.25
Granite $1
Aqua Regia $1.25
Vore $.50
Ascencionism $1.25
Are You Really Okay? $2
The Apparition $1
DYWTYLM $1.75
Rain $.75
Take Me Back to Eden $1
Euclid $2
TOTAL: $15.25
BAND MEMBERS:
Vessel: Vocals, guitar, bass, keyboards, synthesizers, production
II: Drums
LISTEN FOR YOURSELF:
MORE USEFUL LINKS:
https://www.sleep-token.com/
https://www.facebook.com/sleeptoken
murlough23 
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