Review Summary: tiktok band releases new low for depressive horny muzak in the guise of pretentious concept metal. piss on it repeatedly.
Pick up the phone: Sleep Token are a godawful band, get off this page and and run like an ostrich til there’s an entire horizon between your rump and their turgid mismatch of styles that might have belonged together if a more talented and/or tasteful group of musicians had turned their hand to them,
are you there are you still there? yes get out, here are the reasons. First reason, their vanilla-djent / vanilla-pop / vanilla-alt-RnB trifecta is heavily contingent on anonymous-gimmick vocalist Vessel’s competence in the latter. His vocal melodies develop sluggishly and with great blandness, a decision one might normally scorn but that can perhaps be excused as a convincing invocation of worship music as per the hysterically pretentious religious cult trappings that underpin the band’s lore (to pick but one example, opener “Chokehold”’s verses are just a few minor alterations away from a faithful aping of “Onward, Christian Soldiers”). Such melodies require and in fact concertedly attempt RnB-esque charisma to tide things over - to which end it is highly unfortunate that Vessel resembles the tosspot from Imagine Dragons doing vocal warm-ups through a Darth Vader headset throughout the whole record. His inflections and dependence on a digitally modulated tone sound neither intuitive nor comfortable to perform, and consuming them is about the same.
This feeds into the second reason for this album’s kill-on-birth factor, namely its lyricism. For the most part, Vessel runs off a blend of the most cliched bleeding heart metalcore tropes (“My life is torn, my bones, they bleed / My metaphors fall short in the end”) and the laziest clutches at RnB swagger (“These days I'm a circuit board / Integrated hardware you cannot afford”). This is as innocuous here as it has been under the pens of a thousand equally trite lyricists - all well and good, but it has the upshot that when Vessel, insufferably belaboured inflections and all, attempts anything approaching candour, the music’s entire emotional scaffold collapses under the weight of his affect. We hear this on the unwittingly corny self-affirmation snoozer “DYWTYLM” and, more problematically, cheap emotional exploitation of “Are You Really Okay?”. The latter’s stark portrait of caring for someone who self-harms is so overproduced, so unimaginatively rendered both musically and lyrically, so steeped in the vocal style that practically oozes affect at every other turn on the record, that its inclusion comes at best in extremely poor taste, and at worst as an exploitative tactic to cement in the emotionally vulnerable fanbase the band have cultivated so successfully on TikTok.
“Are You Really Okay?” is immediately followed by a procedural stab at trap-metal that clutches at blockbuster Epic so fervently that it might as well have been custom-engineered as a plea to bring Michael Bay back to the director’s seat of the
Transformers franchise; more often than not, any consistency of voice established in Vessel’s lyrics will find itself comically short-handed by whichever stylistic decision follows it.
At this point we have to look at wholesale songwriting and I am obliged to drop the charade that the album’s successive failings can be handled as entirely distinct issues. Translation: fuck this shit. I have a thousand bones to pick with the way this thing is written and constructed, but the largest, hardest, boniest and least forgivable of these is that Sleep Token are playing a patently silly combination of styles and have absolutely no ear for dysfunction. Crass genre fusions are no issue in and of themselves - but they are rarely seamless and almost all their most successful practitioners engage with the jagged end of juxtaposition, typically with performative flair that momentarily foregrounds stylistic disjuncture before taking it in their stride. You’ll hear this from everyone from Babymetal to Mr. Bungle to 100 gecs to Satanicpornocultshop - even Sleep Token’s comrades in bad taste Loathe know better than to underplay moments of disjuncture. This is a key quality that makes their music exciting if you roll with them and at least sympathetic if you don’t. Sleep Token’s songwriting is so unbearably
steady, so bereft of sharp contours, so homogenous in its pace, so bland in its melodies (I count the piano run in “Aqua Regia”’s bridge as its sole melodic flourish), so procedural in their developments, that even the album’s most nonsensical moments of discontinuity disappear into the slog of one-damn-thing-after the next.
This record is so
dull, so bland, that when we as an audience are asked to take “The Summoning”’s unctious funk coda or the token breakdown phoned in at the end of the title-track at face value, as just another part of ongoing compositions that make internal sense and should indeed be Taken Entirely Seriously, well, the stakes are so low and the personality so microscopic that, uh, why the hell not? This band’s tedium, their mercilessly polished tones, their big bucks mastering, their humourless refusal to spotlight any glorious points of absurdity within their own writing, their algorithmic combination of the most derivative parts of how many separate genres into a no less unremarkable whole - it all makes for one of the most irksome feints at artistry I’ve heard this decade and feels oriented towards an impressionable audience with sickeningly calculated precision. It is a mockery of good taste and deserves nothing. You deserve better than this album and this stooge band.
