Sleep Token - Take Me Back to Eden
Sleep Token seems to be the first thing that's really got the metal world talking this year; it's certainly noteworthy that it's the first thing that's got me talking here during this busy year. I didn't do a year-end list last year or even shout-out my favorite albums (which I still should), but after all the lead-up to this album and all the spicy discussion and hype surrounding the band and after finally hearing it in full, I felt motivated to dust off the blog and say in way more words what I'm sure someone else has already said somewhere.
There are a lot of opinions on this album and this band, and they are very much a love ‘em or hate ‘em kind of band, especially with this new album. There’s a very obvious comparison that's been drawn with regard to the hype (some of which I would agree with the haters does seem pretty artificial) around Sleep Token being the next big thing in metal and the more traditionally-minded metalheads being very resistant to them. And that comparison is Ghost. There are definitely parallels there: the anonymity, the lore, Loudwire creaming themselves over them. The comparison to Ghost makes sense on those grounds, and despite the loud minority of haters, after 5 albums and a decade of continuous meteoric rise in sales and increasing venue sizes, Ghost has undeniably won. They did become the next big thing. So, is Sleep Token destined to the same auspicious fate? Are they the next big thing?
The problem with the comparisons to Ghost is that Ghost kicks ass.
I won't bury the lead any longer, this album is way overhyped. I've said it plenty, but I'll say here again just to re-emphasize, I'm no puritan; I like metal adventurous, bold, experimental, unafraid to eat of supposed forbidden fruits like hip hop or pop music, which is clearly the ethos Sleep Token are going for. And on paper, a bold fusion of progressive metal, modern R&B, and swaggering pop music is definitely intriguing, and I'd love to hear what that sounds like someday, because that's not what we got from Sleep Token on this album.
What Sleep Token presents themselves as being what they actually do on record are two rather different things. Sleep Token's primary selling point as the next phenomenon apart from the pseudo-mystical lore and anonymity is the uniqueness of their sound. They do get credit for the uniqueness of the list of ingredients, but a unique sound they do not. And that's because they have several individual sounds that they bounce back-and-forth among, and none of them are at all unique. The handful of modern post/prog-metal sections don’t vary much from each other and aren’t really stylistically unique on their own or even that exhilarating. Most of the time we get either middling rock instrumentation, which is effectively background noise and nothing more than filler stopgap material, or tacky synth pop or trap beats. Neither are made any more evocative by the superficial addition of the synthetic orchestral elements that get peppered into the track list.
There are a lot of various gripes about the album from the haters, and some of it I don’t mind. I don’t mind the R&B-styled vocals, overdone as they can be in some places. I don’t mind (most of) the lyrics, obtuse as they can be. I don’t even mind the clean, polished production too much, but it is compressed to all hell and it doesn’t help with the nonsensical dynamics of a lot of these songs, which leads me to my biggest problem with this album. The compositional direction across the board, from the straightforward post-metal slow-builders to the tacky pop tunes, is aimless and clumsy.
It is so obvious even on the first cursory listen that Sleep Token did not really put much into constructing this album beyond the broad ideas, cutting corners on pesky tasks like song-writing thinking the supposed novelty of the sound would carry the project on its own. Yet for all its commitment to modern R&B, there’s hardly any of the actual cool or sensual appeal there that the band is kinda hinting at. For all the artificial bombast, this album washes over as mindlessly as your average atmospheric-djent/alt-metal project. And for its “bold” implementation of modern pop elements and stylings, of which there is quite a lot, there’s almost none of the basic compositional pop sensibility or even the reluctant memorability of pop music, which leads me to what my other big problem with Take Me Back to Eden, the way they approach pop music.
I’ve been critical in the recent past of the forays into modern pop by the likes of Bring Me the Horizon, Architects, and Bad Omens, not on principle, but just because they tried too hard to fit into the radio-friendly mould that so often led them to awkwardly imitating the likes of Imagine Dragons, Bon Iver, or god-forbid Maroon 5 to make sure their pop-crossover intentions flew over like a lead balloon. And it led to dull song-writing to accommodate the signaling of the intent for a broader appeal. But for all my criticisms of those bands, at least they still tried to bring over some of their performing vigor to their style. Sleep Token, however, overplay their hand on a superficial, overdone swagger that has nowhere near the stamina needed for the 64-minute album they present, and the result is over an hour of awkward toggling between imitative pop-R&B on autopilot and generic alt-flavored post-metal on autopilot.
It’s been said by others and it’s gonna make me sound like such an “elitist” when I say it too, but it’s true, this thing arguably hardly a metal album. Sometimes you’re waiting through several minutes of flubby R&B crooning and trap high-hats until halfway through for distorted guitars to kick in on songs like “Ascensionism” or “Granite”, which sounds like if Five Finger Death Punch were to try their hand awkwardly at an swaggering R&B ballad for the first 2/3rds. And sometimes when the guitars finally do show up after the generic synthetic pop beats, they’re a dull, faint drone under all the other instruments like on “Rain”, the drawn-out title track, and possibly the worst offender: “Are You Really Okay?”. The closing track, “Euclid”, probably integrates the band’s advertised styles the most fluidly, which is to say, not very; the band toss in some choppy bursts of distortion awkwardly into the rest of the otherwise sappy piano-pop ballad.
Sometimes it’s just straight up pop music. And I don’t mean the simple sugary fun kind of pop music. I mean the mind-numbing, practically AI-generated kind of pop music: the kind that inattentive listeners think is fine, the kind that makes people who actually listen to pop music want to pull their hair out (and consequently also repels most metalheads like skunk spray). I criticized BMTH for this on amo (“Medicine” and “Mother Tongue” gave me flashbacks to being trapped listening to top 40 radio at work). And Sleep Token aren’t any more convincing on their more holistic attempts at pop music. I’m amazed that so many metalheads have seemingly unquestionably eaten up what they otherwise would probably spit right out if fed to them not by a nominally metal band.
For example, “Aqua Regia”: it sounds like Imagine Dragons, and when I say Imagine Dragons, I don’t mean when they’re belting out ridiculously like on “Natural” or on “Believer”; I mean when they’re on their waiting in line in the grocery store kinda shit like on “Thunder”. And then there’s the directionless minimalist electro-pop of “DYWTYLM” that completely wastes 4 minutes on something I could only imagine Adam Levine forcing his audience to sit through. It’s the mindless pop melodrama on songs like this and the more spacey sections of other tracks that make the whole vessel-for-some-deity-named-“Sleep” lore thing seem really goofy. Like come on, this deity is communicating through you via vague pop love songs? I guess that tracks given the kinds of scriptures that the major Abrahamic religions running the world enjoy endlessly re-interpreting in their political favor.
I’ll take a break from the negativity and give the band some points where they earned them. For as overly theatrical as they can be, Vessel is a good vocalist and I hope that none of the critique regarding the vocals leads to any kind of shy retreat into a shell of comfort and decreased expressiveness just to play it safe in the future; I definitely prefer the more over-the-top deliveries on the album to the dry, monotonous mumbling sections. The rest of the band prove their instrumental chops too on the few chances they get to make it count within the heavily washed-out tracklist. Cliché as they are, I love a good down-tuned djent breakdowns, and this album’s breakdowns are okay, albeit pretty damn generic and often truncated. But often they’re just kinda tossed onto the tail end of a song they make little sense in the context of and not enough to get me more into those songs.
As far as highlights in the tracklist, there is a scant handful of moments more so than complete songs that show some clear (or wasted) potential. “Chokehold” opens the album pretty well with some tasty industrial grooves that unfortunately doesn’t get built upon as much as it should have, and “Vore” is a pretty decent post-metal-centric cut with some fast drumming and screams to defibrillate you from the past 2 tracks’ induced coma. And apart from the Ivan Moody-esque ballad-y vocal melody on the chorus, it’s a pretty soaring piece of modern alternative metal. In spite of its slightly excessive length, “Ascensionism” is also one of the more really dynamic and heartfelt alt-metal cuts on the album, and the bursts of metallic instrumentation are actually efficacious and feel intentional on this song.
Though it’s unfortunately the only one on the album, “The Summoning” is a genuinely well-rounded, fleshed-out, solid, and ethereal progressive metal song from beginning to end, including the bass-y groove rock outro. Granted, it does kinda just sound like a TesseracT song, but it’s the one song that both encapsulates prog-metal and seems like there was actual work put into the finer details rather than just a vague idea of the broader composition.
Even on this track though, there’s not really as much of an actual meshing of styles as there is the stacking of styles next to each other, which doesn’t make me optimistic for Sleep Token’s future since they’ve clearly decided their path forward is going to be leaning into being the pop-alt-R&B-prog-metal band phenomenon, when a more standard prog-metal route has produced (and seems like it still would produce) the better results for them. Hell, they’re plenty eccentric enough to carve out a pretty enviable niche in the prog metal landscape and stand a head or two taller than the rest of the crop too. Unfortunately carving out that niche might be a tedious process with no guarantee of success, and with all the attention they’re receiving for what they’re doing now, I doubt they’ll change course.
For all its novelty, Take Me Back to Eden did not hit for me, and that's because its eccentricities are superficial, its composition is heavily style-over-substance, and its "genre-blending" is clumsy and unappetizing. I do think the novelty will wear off before this time next year for all the people hailing this album as a masterpiece, and I hope I'm right about that not just because I like being right or because I want to stick it to over-enthusiastic fans in some snooty/critic kind of way. I just don't want the next big thing in metal to be something that sounds so lazily calculated to pander superficially to the lowest common denominator. I do still have some faith in the sort of meritocracy that is the ears of the people, and the penchant for discovery the metal community still has; the most influential and iconic advancements of the genre continue to emerge out of nowhere rather than being heralded in on a silver platter by a media parade. Think the djent revolution that Meshuggah spurred, or the blackgaze revolution that Deafheaven kicked into full gear, or the surprise revival of deathcore that launched Lorna Shore from C-listers to the top of the game.
When it comes to the publicity that any band gets, especially from the big publications that effectively serve as advertising wings of major labels (hence major publications pretty much never giving major releases less than a 7/10 even if those releases are objectively trash, like Nightmares of the Decomposed), that stuff is shallow and most listeners are privy to it. Like any hype train that’s given a big boost on novelty fuel, eventually Sleep Token will have to run on their own, and I think that once the high wears off, a lot of people will realize it was all just gas. But it does still frustrate me that these pop crossover attempts get boosted and talked up like they’re the acts that are keeping metal alive, like the groveling act of making metal on the terms of fleeting pop trends is what needs to be done to keep metal alive and relevant. That’s lazy and weak and it hasn’t ever been what put metal into people’s ears in the past either, not for thrash, not for grunge, not for nu metal, hell not even for glam. The broader pop music sphere caught wind of what was happening and reached out because they wanted what metal was doing, not the other way around. Metal is a genre built on an ethos partly of exhilarating power, and I don’t think that power should be ceded so much to the volatile trends of the day.
To be honest, I guess it makes me a little worried… Pop music has historically come to metal, seeing all sorts of weird, new, exciting, visceral stuff worth trying to emulate and boost. But now it seems like there’s this big push for metal to go the other way, like it’s out of ideas, like there isn’t any more the genre has left to offer, and like it’ll die out without reaching out to the reliable appeal of pop. It’s been a pretty slow year so far, this is the first thing I’ve talked about and the most discussed album of the year so far, by far. Is this the most exciting thing to happen in metal this year? Is this really the best thing we have to offer? Fuckin’ Sleep Token? I hope not.
