Both of Sleep Token's most recent songs came up in a Discord I'm in when they came out. I haven't really listened to the band much outside of this, but I wanted to compile my thoughts for ease of sharing and just because I do still (sometimes) enjoy writing about music.

Sleep Token are a conceptual metal band, formed entirely of anonymous musicians (three known by Roman numerals II through IV, the lead singer taking the name "Vessel" - Vessel's identity is known but I don't think it's relevant to the discussion). Their backstory is that they are a group worshiping a god called "Sleep." Their music is a theoretically-interesting blend of pop music and various forms of heavy metal. I'd imagine this makes a lot of the more serious metalheads reject them outright, but I don't think they're unworthy on that basis. Especially not right now, when pop music is in a very, very good place. If... I don't know, Jessica Thierjung (of Lyriel) wants to pull in influence from Sabrina Carpenter or Chappell Roan or on an upcoming project, why not, right? Bruno Mars is still doing pretty dang well for himself right now, too, why not borrow some of his mojo?

It ultimately comes down to execution.

First, to get this part out of the way: Sleep Token is like Ghost that missed the point. Vessel has denied the influence of Ghost, but... come on, man. A band of fully anonymous performers aside from a lead singer taking up a moniker that suggests a special connection with a god? Acting like you are a group of devotees to a higher power with dark implications? Performing heavy metal music that wears the influence of a past age on its sleeve? Gee, I don't know how anyone could draw this comparison. Ghost is inspired by most classic metal, and Tobias Forge formed the band almost explicitly as a joke group, playing off the idea of the Satanic Panic of the 1970s on the subject of heavy metal. Ghost, effectively, is a band in that style intending to play music that is as satanic as fundamentalist Christian conservatives implied, literally being about worship of Satan and how much Satan fucking rules (or in this case, just fucks) and how much God and all his worshipers suck. It's a pretty good and laser-focused comedy routine, and as a result of its "parody of / tribute to classic metal" vibes, Ghost strongly resembles Blue Öyster Cult - often in sound, definitely in mission (whether they meant to or not). BÖC started their career as a group formed by rock critic Sandy Pearlman to perform songs based on his "The Soft Doctrines of Immaginos," a series of poems he wrote (and I don't think ever published) about an alien who falls to Earth to do evil, eventually causing World War I, bringing fascists to power across Europe, and eventually causing the apocalypse. The Blue Öyster Cult were conceived as a group preaching the message of Immaginos. Effectively, BÖC was the only artist to almost be valid in use of ironic fascism, if it weren't for at least one dude who took it seriously and threw these five nice Jewish boys from upstate New York a Hitler salute, in full Nazi uniform, sometime probably around 1975 - after which point they decided to drop 99% of the idea forever, severely disconnect from the idea of being the characters from the song cycle, and make things more in line with "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" and that. (Of course, the big difference between Ghost and BÖC is that the amount of Satanists who are actually the evil church-burning freak shows that Evangelicals want you to believe is very low (and most of them in the metal scene at least would probably outright reject Ghost's "Scooby-Doo chase music" in favor of blackened death metal at bare minimum), while fascism is an inherently evil ideology.)

So imagine if a group did this with no joke, divested from anything in the real world. Oh, and they replaced the BÖC influence with Deftones, Faith No More, and nu-metal inspo.

Sounds dreadful, right? (Okay, fine, I'm not really averse to the idea in concept, but again, I don't think Sleep Token actually are pulling off what they want to based on the few recent songs I heard by them. On the other hand, they have got a short discography, I could go listen to that all in like a day.)

Confession: I don't know Deftones' music very well. To write this bit, I went and listened to their songs "Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)," "My Own Summer," and "Change (In the House of Flies)." They're okay. "Be Quiet and Drive" feels like... a very generic late-90s/early-00s metal song. "Change" is more like it, creepy and full of distortion on the verses that makes the whole song feel even more uncomfortably screwed-up than it actually feels like. "My Own Summer" is like a bad version of "Change," over-emphasizing the dynamic shift and not using the right filter on the verse vocals (not dirty enough), but an okay concept. See, I get why this band is thought of as being kind of experimental, because they have their moments, but I don't think this quite hits what I think Sleep Token are going for. They are definitely targeting something more out-there than that. And while I feel like I've heard a lot of people compare them to Imagine Dragons - I don't disagree, they do have moments of sounding a little like the band that made Nickelback look like a respectable alt-rock group - the target definitely feels like early Mike Patton-era Faith No More. I can feel a direct throughline between the genre-warping "metal meets every popular style of the late 80s" vibe of The Real Thing and Sleep Token's "Emergence," but like an outtake from that album.

Which, I get it. The Real Thing and Angel Dust are extremely good. The Real Thing is one of my favorite metal albums of the 80s and stands a legitimate chance of being my absolute favorite of that period. This is a period with Ride the Lightning and Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? and Among the Living and Fabulous Disaster and Killing Technology and Reign In Blood and Rage for Order and Blue Blood and Perfect Symmetry and Do you seriously need me to go on at this point? If you haven't figured out that I'm saying that this is high praise, you never will. I think if I had a metal band, I would try at least a little to imitate a song like "Underwater Love" at least a few times. I respect the effort but the results feel undercooked. "Emergence" was acceptable, though. "Caramel" is taking the piss.

So, I think again that "Caramel" is going for a vibe kind of like Deftones' "Change," out of all the songs discussed here. Doesn't quite meet it because the metal parts don't really come up too much until the end of each chorus. Lyrically and vocally, this is extremely RnB. With really badly autotuned vocals. Yes, some parts of this are saturated in the stuff, to the point that they sound mechanized in some way - some people might jump to AI-generated, but I know what overdone autotune sounds like and this is just bad, overdone autotune. It's weird, though; this is exactly the sort of band that I would expect to use extreme autotune specifically to hide their voice, what with the anonymity and the jabs at progressive influence (which would probably want the technophilia that comes along with it; the filtered scream in Van der Graaf Generator's "After the Flood" (at 7:41) is like an iconic moment in prog rock to me!). And yet they just don't go that far with it. It... sounds bad. That's all I can say about it, I'm sorry. The auto-tune is bad.

Set that aside, and mos tof the song is a perfectly fine, if generic RnB/pop song. Give this to an artist who can handle these genres and it'll be fine. But this, this is a METAL BAND, so they have to add something to let you know it's metal. Unfortunately, the metal elements used here are exceedingly generic. Some heavy guitars playing fairly standard heavy metal sounds? Wordless harsh vocals just barely able to be heard in the mix late in the bridge? Oh boy! It's like I'm listening to a real heavy metal album, except I happen to have a few of those, in case you haven't noticed, and this has no real inspiration whatsoever, which most of the ones I own do. This just feels like they're trying to check off a few boxes to have their RnB song count as metal. In short: Who is this for? Pop fans will probably not take kindly to the poorly-integrated metal elements, and the more hardcore metalheads will probably reject this outright. If I had to guess, this is for people who think they have eclectic music tastes because they listen to something a little off, but not so far off the beaten path as to be hard-to-find; they like Tool (who still had a massive #1 album in several countries when they released Fear Inoculum a few years ago, no mean feat for a prog-metal act in the 21st Century!), but don't know what King Crimson is. I get the feeling that Sleep Token's most faithful fans tend toward being the "not like other girls" folks of metal fandom.

And let me emphasize, there is nothing wrong with liking Tool or not knowing who King Crimson are. This music has an audience, but it's not me. Not just because if I want pop metal, there are plenty of classics for me to go dig out, and we already have an absolute juggernaut of poppy prog-metal (not that that helps, I guess). It's because I think the sound choices were wrong for the purposes of listenability and atmosphere, and perhaps this group is not so suited to playing this.

Kinda makes me dread checking out their whole discography, if we're being honest - and not just because I could see myself getting shanked by one of the fans...